


Mistworm (Worm|Mistborn)

by Lightwavers



Category: Mistborn - Brandon Sanderson, Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Alt-Power Taylor Hebert, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-06-30 01:13:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 25,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19842472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lightwavers/pseuds/Lightwavers
Summary: Taylor triggers as a Fullborn. She has the abilities of the Lord Ruler and the knowledge of how to use Hemalurgic spikes. In the absence of naturally-occurring God metals, she can use the ashes of dead capes to make atium or lerasium. A short description is that Taylor can either literally eat bits of metal and then ‘burn’ them for certain powers, store attributes like strength or speed inside of metals she’s touching, or make metal spikes and stab people to put their abilities/powers inside the spikes, and then stab someone else to give that person whatever is in the spikes.Allomantic Metals: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mistborn/images/e/ed/Mb_table_v13-1-.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20100309014918Feruchemical Metals: https://i.redd.it/dtvslvv0jjxx.jpg





	1. 1.1—Awakening

I’d been so certain I was a Tinker.

Diagrams and images and descriptions had flooded my brain, slamming into it with the force of a freight train. For once, I’d been glad to be in the hospital. When I untangled all the information and learned the truth, I’d been disappointed. Tinkers could do so much, especially if they collaborated. I would’ve had to join the Wards and deal with all the teenage drama that entailed, but with a lab and materials that wouldn’t have been as much of a problem.

The doorbell rang, and I bolted, throwing the door open and snatching the package from the confused and wary delivery man before he could set it down.

“Thanks!” I said before slamming the door behind me and rushing back inside. I reached my room and tossed the brown box on my bed, then stretched, taking deep breaths. I needed to get in shape, especially if I was going to be patrolling on the streets and taking down crime.

Online, capes said powers were instinctive. They might seem weak at first, but there was always a trick to them. Skidmark was a prime example, first classified as a mere Shaker two until he started layering his lines to make inescapable prisons and portable railguns. That lined up with my abilities. I had prepackaged instructions in my head for how to use my powers and a vague feeling of what they did, but couldn’t get any more information without the metal I needed. The screws of my bedframe didn’t count, it had to be a certain alloy, and ordering that was expensive, especially without letting Dad know.

I opened the package. Inside were four vials with thin steel flakes suspended in liquid and a two-inch sphere of the same metal. I’d considered adding a spike as well in case just having it told me more about that ability, and had been almost relieved when it turned out that I barely had enough money for just the ball and the vials.

A vial turned over and over in my hands. I stared, shrugged, tugged the cork out and downed the contents. The liquid tasted sharp and left an aftertaste. A moment later, I felt something. It wasn’t like a trigger, more like a furnace I could stoke in my stomach. I concentrated and blinked as blue lines appeared, leading from all around me to my center of mass. I followed the largest one, which connected to my bedframe. Dad still wasn’t home. I Pushed. The bed scraped along the floor, and I went flying.

I picked myself off the floor, rubbing at my new friction burns and glaring at the bed. That … was probably something I should’ve expected. I’d picked steel based primarily off my wallet, but also because of the feeling it gave me. There were sixteen metals my powers used, but there were three ways I could use each metal. The one I knew was Allomancy felt positive, somehow, like it wanted to be used, and came with the wordless knowledge that using it with steel would make things move. I’d confirmed that worked, so I spent the next few minutes on top of my bed hanging on for dear life as I burned through my swallowed steel just in case I could get metal poisoning from having steel in my digestive tract.

That had been kind of disappointing, but I shrugged it off. I’d been expecting telekinesis, and I’d gotten telekinesis. Just … metal-based. And only in a straight line. That pushed me back just as hard. I was more interested in what I could do with the second use. Feruchemy, the neutral one. I picked up the little steel ball and could tell that it would accept what I put in, but it wasn’t eager, not like Allomancy. I let a trickle of something pass from me to the metal, then when nothing happened a flood. I sighed and stood up, but when I moved it was slow. My limbs moved like jelly, and the clock on the wall ticked and spun at a frantic pace. I cut off the transfer, and the world returned to normal.

Except that now there was something inside the steel, waiting for me to take it out. I drew from the tiny well and watched as everything slowed down. I picked up my notebook from on top of my dresser. It moved strangely, and when I let it go it was still creased where I’d held it. Slowly, ever so slowly, it fell, drifting to the ground. Then the flow of energy from the ball evaporated. The notebook hit the floor with a thump and I jolted in surprise.

Yeah, I could definitely work with this. I’d originally wanted to start with gold—not for its Allomantic use, which translated from pure feeling to English was roughly “self-past-ghost,” but because I could use Feruchemy with it to store health. If I was going to beat up supervillains, I’d definitely need healing. Especially with Lung wandering around.

But super speed, and especially super speed that didn’t come with any of Velocity’s limitations? Sign me the hell up.

I was grinning for hours after dinner as I sat on my bed, legs crossed, the world flowing forward without me. Tonight I’d store speed, and tomorrow I’d fight crime. The costume in the basement was a thrown-together piece of garbage and I had access to one-sixteenth of the powers I was willing to use, but for the first time since Emma’s betrayal, I was anticipating tomorrow instead of dreading it.


	2. 1.2—Awakening

Today had been a total flop. School was Emma, as usual, and when I finally went crime hunting There was nothing to find. I even used some of the power in the steel sphere to look for crime—a steel-mind, my power called it—which meant I had less speed available when I finally went out and fought lung.

Fought. Lung.

I had a reason, of course, I wasn’t going to just try beating up probably the strongest cape in Brockton Bay to see if I could. I wasn’t about to let him kill children, no matter how long he chased me.

I put on another burst of speed as I turned the corner, accelerating to one and a half, two, three, four times my usual speed for a few brief seconds in the hopes of finally losing him, when he appeared above me wearing wings. Because of course. I was just running by now; I had no hopes of actually winning a fight with Lung with only a steel-mind, especially when it felt like it might actually run out sometime soon.

“Hey, maybe we can work something out,” I said just before dodging a jet of flame. I got back to my feet, glad I’d had the foresight to tape the steel-mind to my chest, and kept running. If only I’d waited until I could order brass, then I could just store the heat he blasted me with. Or gold; knowing I had a way to heal would make this whole situation a lot less stressful.

“Like, how about you just kind of lightly singe the kids instead of killing them?” I tried.

He roared and descended toward me with an open maw. I squeaked and tapped my steel-mind as hard as I could until the only sound was my beating heart. Nothing that big should be that fast. I spoke to myself between pants as I jogged, shoes slapping against the pavement.

“Okay. Can’t run forever. What can I do?”

My mind was fuzzy, my recent memories a blend of fear and fire and desperately tapping my steel-mind when he got too close. I hadn’t had time to slow down and plan, and now a part of my brain was screaming at me to stop using my speed now or else he’d catch me and I’d have none left and I’d get burned, and what would Dad think.

“Got flakes. Can burn them?” I mumbled.

Wait. That was actually a good idea. I scrabbled at the pouch where I kept my three remaining vials of steel flakes and tipped one down my throat. I focused, and blue lines appeared all around me. A huge, thick rope of a line pointed directly behind me. I turned, and there was Lung.

I panicked, holding my hands out as if to ward him off as I jumped and Pushed against his scaled form, wings stretching out behind him, and sailed off into the sky. At that point I was extremely glad I was tapping steel, because otherwise there was no way I was touching the ground again without splatting against it. The blue lines were thin and faded this high up—I was even above the distant skyscrapers Downtown.

I drifted, passing a pigeon in midflight, wings moving with excruciating slowness. It was scary at first, but after a while it became boring, and then calming. It was less a desperate attempt to save my life and more of a game, using Allomancy to Push against metal below with feather-light touches, smoothly decelerating my fall to earth.

When I touched down on the roof of a squat building with a flat roof and handy fire escape, I was almost disappointed. The day had been terrible, but up in the air with nothing but me and my thoughts, it all seemed inconsequential. Who cared if Emma hated me now, if Sophia shoved me down the stairs or Madison kept one of her sycophants near me at all times? What did it matter that Lung wanted to kill me, or Armsmaster had seen my descent?

Who cared? I could fly.

“Are you a villain?”

Four words were all it took for reality to come crashing back down. I glanced down. My costume wasn’t the best, sure, and I could see how the hockey mask might evoke the image of a bank robber, and I suppose the all-black outfit didn’t help. But it wasn’t like I’d been doing anything wrong. Why couldn’t he have asked if I was a hero?

“Always wanted to be a hero. Just my luck all the good guys think I’m evil. It’s the mask, isn’t it,” I said, slumping against the wall.

I looked longingly at the fire escape. It was only a few feet away, and what was super speed for if not escaping awkward situations? But I was running really low, and what if Lung found me as I was going home?

“Hmph. Be careful. Lung has been sighted not far from here.”

“Uh. Yeah.”

He mounted his bike, but didn’t drive off. “Name?”

I opened my mouth. Closed it. He didn’t mean my civilian name, of course, he wanted my cape name. Which I didn’t have. I thought. It didn’t take long, I had no ideas.

“Hero … Person … Girl?”

“…You may want to rethink that name.”

With that, Armsmaster drove off. I buried my head in my hands, then took it out a minute later. It just wasn’t the same with a mask on. I had the opportunity to speak to Armsmaster himself. He was my hero, and eventually my favorite after my Alexandria phase. And his last comment to me was that I needed a better name. He wasn’t wrong, but still.

I’d been planning on brainstorming ways to get cash if I got out of the whole Lung thing alive—a choice few metals would have allowed me to get away easily, if not turn the tide until he grew enough to overpower me again. But now I was going to do something else with what remained of the night.

I was going to pick a name.


	3. 1.3—Awakening

I was bad at names. But I did get a power-Wikipedia shoved into my skull, so I looked there first. The first word that drifted to the surface of my thoughts was Fullborn, which apparently was what someone with my powers was called. I tried it out.

“Stop, criminal! I am … no, okay, this is even dumber than I thought it would be.”

The Taylor in the cracked and dirty bathroom mirror agreed, her lips curving downward into a heavy frown. Lunch would be over soon. I seriously needed a name, and I’d set myself a deadline—come up with one by the end of the day, or let Armsmaster call me whatever he came up with, which would most likely be something really unflattering. I let another potential name surface and my eyebrows shot up.

“Lord Ruler? Do you think I’m a narcissist, power?”

Then I heard giggles, and sighed. Right, I really needed money. If I could burn tin, no one would be able to sneak up on me and I’d be able to touch the steel-mind sitting in my pocket and be out of here before any of the Trio got close.

“Taylor? What on earth are you doing here? I thought you’d be somewhere more … you. Like a dumpster,” said Emma.

“Can we not? Just come back tomorrow, it’s not like I’m going anywhere.” I said to the mirror.

“And leave you all alone? I’m shocked, Taylor, absolutely shocked. What happened to our history?”

My hand inched into my pocket until I felt the smooth steel surface within. I let a trickle of energy flow from me to the cool metal, letting the world carry on fast enough that I didn’t hear what Emma said next. She frowned, the movement looking almost like a tic with how fast it happened. Sophia stepped forward, and I reluctantly stopped storing speed. I’d have to react properly if she attacked.

“You know what your problem is?” Sophia said.

I stepped back. Her sneer was darker, meaner than usual. Most of the time her violence was almost dispassionate, perfunctory. Like she’d forgotten why she even did it in the first place. Now she looked angry.

“You’re weak. Be better, or stop showing your face around here. Otherwise what happens next will make the workshop prank look like a joke.”

Despite myself, I flinched. No emotion, no emotion. My heart beat faster anyway, my breaths coming quick and shallow. I couldn’t handle another ‘prank’ like that, I’d use my power and out myself in front of the people I least wanted to know about me, and my heroing would be over before it began.

Sophia grinned and darted up to me in a flash. I moved, scrambling back before she could reach me. In my head I knew it was hopeless, but I reacted before I could think it through and realize that avoiding her first strike would only make it worse.

She stopped, freezing in surprise. I looked behind her and noticed Emma and Madison had stopped as well, standing still and staring with wide eyes. I must have still been on-edge from Lung; if I were them I’d be shocked too. I wouldn’t have pegged myself as someone who could avoid someone as fast as her. Sophia was on the track team, and she was good.

She straightened with an odd slowness, and then it hit me. I groaned, leaning against the bathroom wall. I didn’t even care that it was caked in some clingy black filth. My life was over. I took a deep breath and took my hand out of my pocket. Time resumed its normal speed. Madison still hadn’t moved. Emma opened her mouth as if she was about to say something, but then Sophia darted forward and got up in my face.

Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve been holding out, Hebert.”

And then she punched me.

It hurt.

“Don’t leave bruises,” Emma called.

Sophia paused. “Right.”

I was left gasping for breath on the floor, clutching my side. Gold, why didn’t I have gold? I should have done whatever I needed, Dad would have given me some money if I told him it was for an extra-credit school project I needed to pass, it would have stopped the throbbing pain.

Time passed. I missed the beginning of my next class getting myself together, picked my glasses off the floor. They’d skittered under a nearby stall. I let out a sigh of relief when I saw they hadn’t shattered, but the sigh turned into a hiss when I moved too quickly and my side flared up again.

I mumbled out an excuse about tripping and losing my glasses when I got to class. It got me a look of concern, but I declined a pass to the nurse. Nothing would change, and I’d have to get used to dealing with pain anyway if I wanted to keep being a hero. I was just glad that none of my tormentors seemed to have realized my speed was due to powers.

One thing was for sure: I needed to get a handle on my powers before going out again if a normal schoolgirl could beat me up that easily.

“Looks like you get to choose who I am, Armsmaster,” I said to myself.

“What?”

“It’s nothing, Greg, Just thinking about the project.”

I proceeded to ignore the lecture. There was a lot to my powers, and I’d initially avoided theorizing about the feeling-descriptions because I’d thought it would be simple to pick up what I needed at the Trainyard. As it turned out, I couldn’t just pick up a penny and shave off flakes of it to burn Allomantically. Every metal I touched was an alloy, and not an alloy I needed. If the metal was ninety-nine percent pure, that one percent was still enough to make storing anything in it painful and inefficient, and could even be poisonous to burn. That steel was the first time I’d been able to actually use my powers, and it was a rush.

_ Allomancy _ . I wrote the word down in my notebook and underlined it. It was written in code, using a substitution cipher I’d started using the first time Emma stole my diary. I started with iron, jotting it down and then the feeling-description I got from it when paired with Allomancy.

_ Iron: Pull-move. If it works like steel, I could combine them to juggle piece of metal in midair, faking telekinesis. Alone, I could pull whatever’s in front of me to move faster. Would need to practice. _

_ Steel: Push-move. Clumsy telekinesis. Pushes metal away in a straight line. Pushes me back with equal force. Very powerful—can shoot myself into the sky. If it works with bullets, I might be able to deflect them before they hit. _

_ Tin: Sense. Probably gives enhanced senses. Could be very useful depending on how powerful it is. Many capes have better senses. Circus, Cricket, maybe even Lung if that’s how he found me so often. Relatively cheap, definite priority for testing. _

_ Pewter: Strength. Most likely super strength. Like Aegis? Test and find out. Made with lead, supplier might not know how to make it. _

_ Zinc: Pull-emotion. Some sort of emotion control? Don’t know how it’s different from brass. Maybe it changes different emotions? Not a priority. Don’t want to be a Master. _

_ Brass: Push-emotion. Same as zinc. _

_ Copper: Hide-pulse. Not sure what this means. Might make me invisible? _

_ Bronze: Hear-pulse. Might let me hear powers. _

The bell rang before I could get any farther. I slipped out of my seat and headed for my bus, mind whirling with ideas. The ride home was spent thinking of what I could do with my powers, since it was too crowded and the bus’s vibration too strong for me to write anything down. I knew steel the best, and by extension probably iron as well, and couldn’t help thinking of everything I could do with it. Maybe if I carried some pennies and Pushed against them I could mimic flight, and then throw down another as I got close to the ground. I’d need to tap steel while testing, to make sure I could react in time. And I definitely needed some gold before I did anything that could result in me going splat against the ground.

When I stepped off the bus I heard a dull thrumming that seemed to be coming from behind me, but after turning around I saw nothing. A moment later the thrumming stopped. I drew my arms in closer to my body, feeling suddenly colder for some reason.

A few minutes later I saw the body on the sidewalk.


	4. 1.4—Awakening

For the second time in as many days, I regretted not having a phone. I could’ve just called in Lung, and a single call would bring in an ambulance to help the poor guy laying on the ground. I ran to his side and looked him over.

“Hey! If anyone’s around, I’ve got someone who’s been beaten up over here! Call an ambulance,” I shouted.

Hopefully someone heard that. Now I just had to provide first aid. I put my backpack to the side and took out the spare change of clothes I’d gotten into the habit of bringing to school, and struggled to pull a strip off the sleeve. It refused to tear, and I glared at the fabric.

“If only I had pewter,” I muttered.

I ended up pressing the shirt against his torso and wrapping the pants around his leg. Those were the injuries that were still bleeding. There was blood encrusting the back of his head, but it had stopped so I let it be. I’d heard somewhere that you weren’t supposed to move people with head injuries. There were blotchy purple spots all across his body, though all but the biggest ones were hard to see against his dark skin.

“Person in need of an ambulance! If you can hear this, call the police!”

Now that I had some time to think, I had to wonder how this had happened. Muggings were rarely anywhere near this bad, and this wasn’t Empire territory. Maybe he’d gotten in with the Merchants, and this was the result of a drug deal gone wrong? If so it must have happened recently, and in broad daylight. Yet I was the first person to see him.

I kept pressing my clothes against his wounds, shouting for an ambulance every so often, until I caught the rising screech of sirens, and breathed out a sigh of relief.

“Finally,” I said, standing up.

My knees were sore from being pressed against the gritty pavement for so long, and now that I was somewhat relaxed, the pain in my side from Sophia’s show of force flared up again. I grimaced and waited as the PRT van pulled up by the sidewalk.

Wait. PRT?

I could only stare in confusion as the large foam-sprayer on top of the van turned toward me and unleashed a wave of expanding containment foam, which caught me and hardened in moments.

My breaths were quick as I drew in the stuffy air. It was hard to breathe, though I knew containment foam was specifically engineered to allow people to stay harmlessly within it for hours on end. Maybe this was just standard procedure at the site of a suspected parahuman crime, to foam all witnesses so they couldn’t just slink away without giving a report on what they’d seen.

As much as I tried to convince myself that this was totally normal and that I should focus on calming down, I couldn’t help but think that something was horribly wrong. I tried shifting into a more comfortable position, but the foam’s give was deceptive and only entangled me further. If I could reach into my pocket I could make this go much more quickly, but it was just out of reach.

I growled, the sound barely audible even to my ears. Having my metal out of reach was a mistake. I resolved to get piercings with small bits of metal that I could use as emergency stores as soon as I had the money and metal to do it with. This was infuriating.

Time passed. I strained to catch any sound from outside, but I could hear nothing. Maybe if I had tin I’d be able to make something else out—I cut that thought off. Bemoaning my lack of metals was useless. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on out there, and regret that I wasn’t more prepared. After forever, I felt movement, and then some strong acceleration that quickly smoothed out. The van taking me to the PRT building for questioning?

What would Dad think if I wasn’t home before him?

More time passed. I strained against the foam, trying again and again to reach my steel-mind no matter how futile it was. Eventually, I felt something. Liquid hit my forehead and I panicked before I remembered that containment foam was waterproof, and this had to be the dissolving agent.

I gasped as my head was freed, then squinted against the harsh white light. I was in a small … cell. The door was a big metal thing, and the only things in the room were a toilet, a soft spray of liquid, a curtainless shower area, a camera on the ceiling, and a bench.

As soon as I was fully freed I stuck my hand in my pocket, feeling the reassuringly cool surface of the steel ball. I was glad my pants were baggy, otherwise they might have seen the bulge it made and confiscated it. I sat on the bench, ignoring the bits of foam that clung to me. The stream of dissolving agent stopped, and a nozzle on the ceiling I hadn’t noticed before retreated into its niche.

No one came. I stored, bundling up all my thoughts and worries and imagining shoving them into my steel-mind the same way I stored my speed. There was no clock to mark the time, but it passed anyway as I crammed as much speed as I could into the metal. I could feel the rough amount I was storing, which I judged to be about eighty percent, but I knew it could be more. I was being inefficient; with practice and concentration I could get closer to a hundred percent of my total speed, though never reach it.

The door opened in a blink, and I quickly stopped storing and peered at the figure who strode in. I recognized her instantly. If the American flag covering her mouth hadn’t given it away, the twin handguns certainly did.

I stood up. “Miss Militia?”

She gave me a grave look, somehow conveying anger and disappointment with only her eyes. The door hissed shut behind her before I thought to get a look at the hallway outside.

“Alright, Taylor. Let’s talk.”

I blinked. “Okay … can you tell me why I’m here? Did that guy survive?”

She nodded, slowly. “It’s good that you’re showing remorse. It opens up your options.”

“Remorse? For what? I helped him. No one else was around, he could have died.”

“Denial won’t help you, Taylor. We have an eyewitness. I’m here to help discuss your options before your lawyer arrives. You could go to jail for a very long time. Your best bet is joining the Protectorate as a Ward, on a probationary basis. Because of your connection to the Empire, you’ll be transferred to another location.”

My mouth dropped open. Had I just been framed as a Nazi? Who would—no, I knew who would do that to me. The same people it always was. No surprise there, the same people who’d made a wreck of my life for the past two years had somehow conspired to frame me for attempted murder.

“I want to see the lawyer you mentioned.”

Miss Militia sighed, her handguns transforming into a light metal pole. “I hope you make the right choice.”

With that, she left.


	5. 1.5—Awakening

They had a lawyer on-site, and the talk was swift and perfunctory. Apparently I wasn’t being charged for any crime yet, so I just had to settle down and wait until I was. The PRT was allowed to detain people for a week without cause because of a precedent where it was needed to resolve a Master/Stranger situation. After that I was left to twiddle my thumbs again. I spent the time trying to store more than eighty percent of my speed, and when someone finally came for me I felt that I’d succeeded somewhat in my goal. The agents wore reflective visors that revealed nothing, and I knew that they were receiving video feed of what they saw to thwart any Strangers.

“Where are we going?”

The voice came out digitally distorted. “The director wishes to speak with you. You can decline if you want.”

Yeah, I could decline, and then I’d be stuck in a cell until I died of old age.

They didn’t even put me in handcuffs, only asking that I promise not to escape. I might’ve thought they were being too trusting toward someone who was supposed to have brutally beaten someone to within an inch of his life, but those foam sprayers on the ceiling weren’t as hidden as they could be. I got the sense that they were watching me, in the little twitches in the way they moved that seemed as if they were making sure they always had the optimal angle to capture me.

I shook my head. I was being paranoid. A door hissed open, and one of the two PRT agents went inside while the other stayed next to me. They weren’t carrying foam sprayers, instead displaying holstered pistols against their sides and large rifles across their backs. I hoped they were loaded with rubber bullets.

“Send her in already,” came an irritable voice from inside the room.

I took that as an invitation and walked in, the other PRT agent trailing behind me. A squat woman sat across a large, solid desk. A simple plaque had Director Piggot written on it. I couldn’t help but think that the name fit her. She scowled at the faceless agents and pointed at the door.

“Out. I can’t have a civil conversation with you two looming over her.”

The one who’d entered first hesitated and looked at me, then back at the director. “Ma’am—”

“I said out. If she kills me, you’ll just have to deal with Rennick from now on.”

For some reason, I didn’t feel any more comfortable after they left. I slowly took the seat in front of the desk, Piggot glaring at me with steel-gray eyes the entire time. It felt like I was in front of the kind of person Sophia pretended to be, above it all and unafraid of anything that could happen to her. I had the feeling that if I threatened to torture her she’d laugh and tell me to go ahead. I resorted to storing steel to make time go by faster, and as a result almost missed the first thing she said.

“—has come to light. If it turns out you’re innocent, you’ll be given a full public apology and a small settlement as reparations. Now, until the investigation is over you’ll be watched, but you’re not currently being detained.”

The words came out before I could stop them. “Oh, so I assume the containment foam, steel doors blocking the way out, and all the guys with guns are just for show, then.”

She grimaced. “You’ve had a traumatic experience. I understand that you’re upset, and the person responsible for your imprisonment will be held accountable. Your—”

“Who was it?”

She stopped talking and her expression transformed into a heavy frown. Her speech was slower now, more clipped and precise. “I understand that you’re upset. That I’m talking to you at all is a show of good faith. I could order you released right now, with no explanation whatsoever until the situation is resolved.”

I lowered my gaze. My silence seemed to have satisfied her, and she spoke again after a moment.

“Now, if you think someone has a vendetta against you, especially if he or she has connected your powers to a civilian identity, you can provide a name and we will bring them in to sign an NDA about your identity.”

“Oh, I know who it is. Emma, Sophia, and Madison. It’s always them. Nothing happens, nothing will ever happen. I don’t know why I’m bothering. When they saw me use my powers I thought they didn’t notice anything at first, thought they were just surprised that I even started to fight back after two years, but of course they noticed. I can’t believe I thought they didn’t.” I realized I was mumbling and cut off my rant with a muttered curse. Mom taught me to enunciate, and her teachings were one of the only things I still had of her.

“I need their full names, miss Hebert,” Piggot said.

I leaned back, startled. Before, she’d been a bored predator, ready to bite my head off if she needed to but content to let me ramble on. Now she was intent, focused.

“Uh, Emma Barnes, she’s the person I’d say is probably responsible. She was always at her best in social situations, could’ve given one of the heroes my description and said she’d seen me killing people or something. Then there’s Sophia Hess. She’ll kick you down the stairs if she doesn’t think you’re scared enough. She’s not as bad as Emma, but … it’s close.”

Especially since the workshop prank. She was the reason I didn’t try hiding in the club or elective rooms anymore. If my power didn’t require me to use metal, I’d probably have developed a phobia of it. It’d taken almost a month before I could even touch a spoon again, and the promise of powers to get me to order my first metal-mind and the steel flakes. I was over that aversion by now, but that incident was the closest I’d ever gone to going Carrie.

“And then there’s Madison Clements. I don’t think she’s as … um, invested as the others, but she’s just as much of a pain. She spreads rumors, or gets others to do stuff in return for favors. One time the entire football team followed me home, and I thought—nevermind. Uh, those are the main ones.”

Piggot nodded and made a gesture in the air. “I see. We’ll look into these people. You won’t be going back to school for a while since you’re technically still not cleared of the crime, and the law says we need to have constant surveillance on you at all times, but otherwise you’re free to do as you will.

“You’ve seen what crime does to this city, to its people. If you want to do anything that will actually help, join the Wards. We’ll be better able to solve any problems that develop in your civilian identity as well as steering you on to the path of an effective hero.

“Assault will escort you out and answer any questions you might have. I have to deal with this mess.”

She began making gestures in the air again. After waiting for a moment in case she had anything else to say, I turned around and left. As promised, Assault was waiting on the other side of the door, dressed up in his red bodysuit, holding a classic hero pose that relaxed into a casual slump against the wall a moment later. He had a featureless mask in his hands and held it up so me as soon as I faced him.

“Here. For your identity. You know what they say: better late than never.”

I took it and put it on. It wasn’t my size, but it did have some light adhesive that kept it from falling off. It wasn’t until we started walking that I realized Piggot had forgotten to actually explain the situation as she’d said she would. Maybe she forgot? No, that didn’t seem like her. I tentatively decided that her speech about not explaining had just been her telling me what she was doing.

“So, you got a name? Or should I just call you Mask?”

I sighed. “Might as well. The closest thing to a hero name my power gives me is utterly ridiculous.”

“Ah, weird power? Well, there goes my first suggestion. Tying your name to your power is a good bet if you don’t want to regret it years later when it’s too late to change. Clockblocker feels all smug now, but I’d bet money that once he gets into the Protectorate he’ll be gritting his teeth whenever he hears it.”

My eyebrows rose. “Assault and Battery.”

He grinned. “Some of us never grow up.”

We walked some more. I was tense, ready for him to start telling me about the Wards, but he never did. “Just say it already,” I said.

He raised a single eyebrow in that annoying way only some people could do. “You’re waiting for me of all people to give you the standard recruitment speech? They gave up on trying to get me to do that a long time ago. Nowadays I tend to ask potential recruits stuff like, ‘How was your day?’ and wait for them to let out all the terrible details to someone who actually cares. So, how was your day?”

“Someone who actually cares?” I said.

“Kids can tell when someone’s just humoring them. Even big kids like you or me,” he said in a low voice, like he was telling me some grave secret.

I eyed him. It wasn’t like telling someone would hurt. The PRT already knew the details, and one of the heroes thought I’d tried to kill a guy. Getting my side of the story on the record could only help. And I had no doubt that it would be on the record. Assault could be as friendly as he wanted, but I knew the purpose was to get me to spill any incriminating information.

So I told him. First about Emma, and our friendship. Then Sophia’s entrance and Emma’s betrayal. He flinched at that part; he probably had a similar experience in his past as well. There were rumors on PHO that Assault had been a villain before he joined the Protectorate. I left out the moment when I gained powers. I told him about running from Lung, the claws missing by an inch as I accelerated out of the way just in time, feeling in a very visceral way how my reserves of speed dropped as I did so and knowing if I reached empty I was dead. About the way a pit formed in my stomach as I flailed out with powers I didn’t understand and launched myself into the air, and guided myself down with exacting detail, as Armsmaster talked to me in a few terse sentences and rode away to find Lung as soon as he was sure I wasn’t a villain. Then I described my encounter with the Trio in the bathroom, and my desperate self-delusion as I tried to convince myself that their reactions meant they hadn’t discovered my secret, and finding the body and the endless stream of foam coming at me in an unstoppable wave.

“…and they just drove around the corner and doused me in the stuff. I was bandaging the guy, why couldn’t they have just taken a second to see if I was violent before sticking me in it for hours on end?”

Assault tilted his head to the side as he thought. “It’s … you have to understand their mindset before you’ll actually get it. I didn’t, not for the longest time. Powers … they give you more than just the power itself. They give you a sort of diplomatic immunity. Hookwolf isn’t going to just kill you on the streets, because the Empire needs you. The Merchants, the ABB and even the Protectorate will all treat you with a certain amount of respect because capes are rare, and they keep the game going. For someone who’s just a normal person, every time they’re up against a cape they face death at the flick of a finger. And there’s nothing you can do after you’re dead. Sure, the cape could go to prison, but they won’t put you in the Birdcage unless you murder your way through swathes of civilians, or do something completely unacceptable. Like killing a cape.”

I sighed. “Diplomatic immunity? I guess I could see that; I had wondered why heroes never just yanked the masks off and hunted down anyone with powers after they escaped so many times. And I’m not trying to be one of those people who complains all the time, it’s just … my first night out, I fought Lung. I was just looking for small crimes, you know? I was hoping to catch a drug deal in progress, or a mugger or something. Not anyone armed, and definitely not Lung. I figured I could just use my speed to run away if I came across anything that was too much, but he was going to kill children, and I didn’t even have a phone with me. And then the second time I get wrapped up in the cape stuff, I’m not even in costume.”

“When you put it like that, your luck is pretty awful. You’re a regular Calamity Jane, aren’t you?”

I blinked. “Yeah … You know, I told myself that whatever Armsmaster called me would be my name if I didn’t come up with one before school let out. This is sort of the same thing, isn’t it? Calamity Jane … I can work with that.”

He snorted. “I’m glad you think so, though I’d wait until hearing what the image consultant has to say before settling on that. If you join the Wards, anyway.”

We reached the front desk, and I looked out the bulletproof windows. Huh. For some reason I’d expected it to be night. With luck, I could get home before Dad even noticed I was gone.

“Oh, before I leave you: your dad’s coming to pick you up. Don’t worry, he wasn’t angry or anything. He mostly sounded relieved. Good luck out there, kid.”


	6. 1.6—Awakening

Assault had been right.

My Dad wasn’t angry, not even close. He acted kind of … hollow, like he was trying desperately to treat everything as normal despite how everything had changed. He even ignored the phone the PRT had given me, even though I awkwardly held it clutched against my chest as I got in the car.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said as we started driving.

I flinched. He said it in a calm, level tone, but his hands were tightly clutched against the wheel.

“Dad…”

“What would you like to have for dinner tonight? I forgot to go to the store today, but we still have that spaghetti from last night.”

I closed my eyes and breathed in. This was his way of saying that everything could still be normal, that he knew I hadn’t told him about my powers and was willing to play along. A few days ago I would’ve said this was the best possible outcome, but now I just wanted him to react.

“I was going to tell you, Dad. When I finally figured out how my powers worked and got enough money—”

“Enough money that you couldn’t hide it.”

I curled into myself. That was the harshest thing Dad had said to me since before Mom died, and even though I knew it was relatively innocuous and he was completely justified, it still hurt. Somehow the sting was worse than Sophia’s beating, which caused a twinge in my side as I remembered it.

He let out a breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. I was just worried about you.”

But I knew he did mean it, that moments of tension were when the truth came out. Like when Emma revealed her hate for me, or the druggies I’d sometimes see wandering around broken and begging for money. Everyone was rotten inside in some way, but some people, like Piggot, were really really good at hiding it. And others such as Assault or Clockblocker warded away that inner nastiness with humor.

“I … talk to me Dad. I don’t know what you’re thinking.”

He smoothly stopped at a yellow light, ignoring the furious honk from behind us. “I always knew something like this would happen. I just hoped it would be later. Your Mom, she always stood for what she knew was right.”

He was referring to the time that Mom had run with Lustrum’s crew, before that wave of feminism had gone too far and crashed and burned, setting the movement back years. I’d had suspicions that she hadn’t quit quite so early, and it seemed Dad was finally acknowledging that.

“It wasn’t what killed her, in the end, but sometimes I couldn’t help but think that it would come back to us. And then you just go out and—I heard that was you Lung was following last night. Lung. Please tell me your power makes you invincible.”

“It uh … can kind of do that, yeah,” I said cautiously.

“That’s a no, then,” he said grimly.

“If I had the right metals, I could survive my own beheading.”

I paused. I wasn’t sure where that knowledge had come from, but it felt right. If I had enough health inside a gold-mind … yeah. One of the rules of Feruchemy I’d teased out of the info-dump in my head was that I couldn’t hurt myself from storing something vital, I’d just automatically start tapping instead. I assumed that rule held true as long as I was touching the relevant metalmind, even if I couldn’t consciously tap it because I lacked a head. I wondered if a new body would grow from the head, a new head would sprout up from the body, or I’d just have to flail about until I found my head and manually reattached it. I shuddered. One thing was for sure: I never wanted to learn from experience.

The car started moving again. Dad was tense, shoulders drawn in in a mirror of my own.

“I shouldn’t be working myself up in the car,” he muttered, consciously relaxing his muscles in an exercise I recognized as one the dockworkers used to limber up before working. “We’ll talk more once we get home, okay?”

I quietly agreed, and stored steel for the rest of the ride. Once we reached the house, Dad parked the car. We went inside and sat at our places at the kitchen table, habit making the action automatic.

“So you probably want to know about my powers.”

He had an odd look on his face. “I—sure. What’s your power?”

I got up. “I’ll be right back, just gotta get my notebook.”

The trip upstairs was quick. I took a moment to calm myself. Didn’t I have emotional control as an ability? I could really use a dose of pure relaxation right now. I mentally bumped up the priority for zinc or brass and groaned when I remembered the last time I’d had my backpack, and with it my notebook, had been at the scene of a crime. I had no illusions about the ability of my substitution cipher to stand up to government code crackers. At least I’d only written down some of my Allomantic abilities. I resolved right then to never write down anything about Hemalurgy. If the Protectorate saw what I could do with that, learned about the superpowered minions or incredibly-strong trolls I could create and mind control to do whatever I wanted, I’d be sitting in a cell until I agreed to join the Wards or else get shipped off the Birdcage. I’d seen the Canary trial, I knew what happened to capes even vaguely reminiscent of Nilbog or the Simurgh.

Speaking of the Simurgh, I wondered what copper would do against her. Hide-pulse, my power told me. The key was the pulse, I thought. Was precognition done through some sort of science-y ‘pulse’ that copper could block? I shook my head. I was trying to distract myself from Dad, and it was working. I dropped the phone on my desk and snatched a vial of steel flakes from under my bed, clomping down the stairs and pulling up my chair.

“Sorry Dad, the PRT probably have my notebook as evidence.”

Not that it mattered all that much. I had all the information I needed about my power right here in my head. I’d just thought it would be less awkward if we were staring at a page instead of at each other. I quickly explained the difference between Allomancy and Feruchemy, and how they were two different methods of using my power.

“I only have steel right now, because it has to be the exact right alloy or it won’t work, but even without any other metals I have two useful powers already.”

I touched my steel-mind and tapped, pulling hard at the stored speed until everything was frozen in place, then walked over to the other side of the room, hunching down as close to the ground as I could get so that I didn’t accidentally push myself into the air and have to wait for gravity to ever so slowly pull me back down. I let the world resume.

Dad jerked back, startled, then shook his head. “Guess I’ll have to get used to that.”

I went back and sat down, pulling out the vial and putting it on the table. The steel flakes swirled around in the alcohol solution. I took it, unstoppered, and drank. The store of power flared to life inside me, and translucent blue lines appeared leading from sources of metal all over the house to my chest. I put the steel-mind down and tried giving it a light push, just enough to send it rolling across the table. It stubbornly refused to move. I frowned and pushed harder. With an effort of will, the metal inside me flared and I felt the lightest full-body shove. The metal rolled forward a few inches and stopped.

“That’s odd. When I used it before, Pushing off with Allomancy was strong enough to let me fly.”

Dad frowned, putting his hand to his chin as he thought. “Well, I can think of two possible reasons that you had such a hard time moving it. The first is that your special steel resists your telekinesis just because it’s the right alloy to use with your powers. Having that kind of weakness would line up with what I’ve heard about many of the most powerful heroes and villains, except for the Triumvirate. The other possibility is that your two ways of using your power interfere with each other, so you can’t easily move anything you’re using for speed, and vice versa.”

Huh. That was pretty important to think about. If I had that kind of weakness, I’d have to watch out for metal. First I’d need to test it, though. I had two more vials of Allomantic steel upstairs I needed to try Pushing. And I might as well try storing some speed in a steel flake and then trying to burn it to see if it worked the other way around as well.

“So what are the other metals, and what do they do?”

I brought him up to speed with what I knew and suspected of the first eight Allomantic metals, then started speculating about the rest. There was cadmium, which gave me the feeling of Pull-time, and bendalloy which seemed paired with cadmium, as I got Push-time from it. Some sort of time manipulation was my guess, and depending on how they worked—maybe freezing and unfreezing objects in time, respectively—I might be able to pull off a decent Clockblocker impression. Gold was hard to interpret, but a rough translation was past-self-sight, which … might be useful? Electrum was the opposite, as future-self-sight, and I had a good feeling about that one.

“Sounds like every two metals are paired in some way, like iron and steel. We might be able to guess at what they do if we just get you half of every pair,” Dad said, absently fiddling with the empty steel vial.

I went through the next Allomantic metals quickly. Chromium was empty-other, aluminum empty-self, and I was not going to be trying that on anyone friendly until I knew exactly what that meant; nicrosil was burn-other and duralumin burn-self. That probably meant it enhanced Allomantic abilities, based on how I burned steel, but I resolved to treat them like chromium and aluminum.

Thankfully, the feeling-descriptions I got for Feruchemical abilities were much clearer.

“So at first I thought that iron would let me store weight, but I’m pretty sure tapping it really hard won’t cause me to collapse into a puddle, so now I think it lets me store density. It won’t let me fly on my own, but if I use it and steel I bet I could do a pretty good imitation of it. Tin and Pewter feel the same as the Allomantic versions, just more … selective. Then zinc is also speed, but only mental speed, along with something else. Intelligence, I think?”

By now it was night, and neither of us were at the table anymore. I was pacing, alternately storing and tapping my steel between thoughts, and Dad was cooking for the first time in a while. Well, he was reheating spaghetti, but still. This was the first time we’d had more than brief, cursory interactions in a while.

“For brass, I get warmth. It’s part of what made me think I was a Tinker when I first got my powers, because when I think about it I get this image of me melting metal and shaping it with my bare hands, and I know I can do it. It’s like I have these instincts, where I know exactly how to get the right alloy of any metal or make sure it’s pure.”

And how to fashion any metal into the ideal Hemalurgic spike, and place it optimally in the human body to take or give power, and give me influence. Or to change it into an inhuman one. At most, I was going to use that knowledge to make myself piercings that wouldn’t fall out.

“Copper lets me store memories, so when I get some studying will be a breeze.”

Dad laughed and placed two plates of spaghetti down on the table. “I think your teachers would consider that cheating.”

I stuck my tongue out at him. “Hey, it’s not like anyone’s going to know. Unless someone tells on me.”

He raised his hands. “Alright, alright, I surrender. I’ll keep your secret, mysterious parahuman.”

I smiled. “After that, there’s bronze. I can put in … anti-sleepiness?”

“I think you mean wakefulness.”

“Eh, that works too,” I said with a shrug. “Cadmium can store breath. I’m not sure if that means it holds oxygen, or if I can breathe in something like sleeping gas and store that so it doesn’t affect me. I’ll have to test that. Just like everything else. Bendalloy lets me store … energy, sort of. But not like pure energy, more like … food? And drinks? Gold’s the metal I should probably get next because it can hold health. Unfortunately, it’s gold, so I’ll probably have pretty much every other metal first.”

Dad paused and gave me a look I couldn’t read. I tilted my head, inviting him to interject, but he said nothing. I frowned and continued.

“Electrum’s made from gold and silver, so it’s probably going to be just as difficult to get ahold of. It only stores determination, so it’s not essential or anything. Chromium is kind of weird. It can hold fortune, but I don’t know how that works. My luck’s bad enough as it is that I don’t really want to risk storing it, but I’ll probably have to if I want to actually be a hero.”

And if used as a Hemalurgic spike, chromium could steal destiny. I imagined someone spiking Eidolon and shuddered. Would it act like a Stranger power, transferring all the respect and authority he had? Or would someone with his destiny just happen to luck into killing Nilbog and other similar S-class threats?

“Then nicrosil stores … powers, is the closest word I can think of. I might be able to put my ability to use Allomancy or Feruchemy inside some nicrosil, though I’m not sure exactly how that would work in practice, or if someone else could use them.”

“You should think about testing that,” Dad said mildly.

Yeah. Trumps were rare, and if I could gift someone with, say, a few hours of steel Feruchemy people would pay a whole lot for that. I might be able to buy a gold-mind much faster if I could literally sell powers.

“The next two are pretty nebulous. Aluminum stores identity, and duralumin connection.”

Dad looked at me and nodded, though I got the feeling that the gesture wasn’t really meant for me. “You’re not going to stop.”

I could guess what he meant. “I have to be a hero, Dad. I have powers, really good ones. I can’t just do nothing.”

“I know.” His smile was wistful, now. He fiddled with his wedding band and slid it off his finger. “Twenty-four-karat. Pure gold.”

He slid it across the table to me. My eyes widened and I plucked it off the table. “Dad, you don’t have to—”

I could feel it. A neutral acceptance of whatever I decided to do, leave it empty or start filling it. The metal didn’t care.

“Dad…”

His smile was sad now. “If she knew what you could do with it, she would tell me to give it to you in a heartbeat.”

I put it on my finger, rapidly blinking. “I … thanks.”


	7. 1.7—Awakening

Dad made me stay home the whole day when he learned that storing gold would make me sick. I couldn’t just not store, not when the health it gave me would be my lifeline when I inevitably slipped up and I had to fight Lung again, or something equally terrible happened. Considering the luck I’d had so far, the moment I went patrolling I’d find Hookwolf sitting outside the door. I idly wondered what would happen if I spiked myself with chromium. Would it take away negative destinies as well?

I snorted, then sneezed and plucked another tissue out of the box next to my bed.

“Flee, criminals, or you will forever have the life of Taylor Hebert,” I said, the words soft and grating.

My throat hurt, but I grinned. I slipped in and out of wakefulness, keeping a constant stream of around thirty to forty percent of my health pouring into the worn ring. My other hand rested against my steel-mind, but I didn’t push in my speed as well in case it also slowed the amount of health I was storing. I picked up a vial of steel flakes and studied it, then realized I’d been zoning out and blinked back to consciousness.

“Might as well,” I murmured, successfully popping the cork off the vial after a few failed attempts and sticking my finger in.

I caught a few flakes of steel and slowly drew them out of the liquid, then licked them off my finger and swallowed. A store of power appeared inside of me, though it was much, much less than when I drank a full vial. I fished around in the vial for another flake, then burned steel.

Translucent blue lines flickered into existence. I squinted, and smiled. It was faint and frail, but there, a thin thread of light connecting the tiny flake to my chest. A larger one connected me to the vial and the rest of the flakes that floated within. Now came the real test. I focused on the single flake, the liquid causing it to shine in the morning light, and Pushed.

My finger jolted back against an invisible force, and the flake went flying. It instantly left my sight, lost among the hundreds of other sources of blue lines all around the room. I let myself fall back into my bed, exhausted, but with a wide grin across my face. Looked like I didn’t have to worry about a weakness to chemically pure metals after all.

After a while, I reached for the vial again and studied it. I was hard-pressed to affect my steel-mind with Allomancy, so filling a steel flake with some speed and trying to burn it would probably just render it Allomantically inert. If I were less sick and tired I might have decided to try it anyway, but since I almost definitely knew that trying to burn a Feruchemicallly charged metal would just give me metal poisoning I decided to put it off until I had health to spare, and nothing else on my plate. I looked at the ring around my finger and stared at it as time passed, eventually noticing a faded impression of a heart, the scratches hidden in the old scored and dented metal. I thought about gold.

It was valuable as a metal and my power seemed to know that. Already I’d teased out that ‘health’ meant more than just the ability to heal, otherwise I would’ve felt completely fine except that the ache in my side wouldn’t have gotten any better. It also seemed to act as a weaker version of bendalloy, what with the dryness of my mouth and the aching hollow in my stomach that disappeared when I tapped it for a minute, just to see what it was like. The first thing I noted was the general sense of wellness that I imagined was better than any drug. My sniffles disappeared and my skin practically buzzed. I felt like I could run forever. The pounding headache that had snuck up on me was gone, and I was fresh and alert, so it seemed that it could do bronze’s job as well. On impulse, I closed my mouth and waited. The draw from the ring increased a bit, but I never felt like I had to take a breath. There went my need to store anything in cadmium. I laughed.

“You’re like the Swiff Army Knife of Feruchemy,” I said to it.

I reveled in the feeling of absolute health for a while longer, then cut off the stream of power with a sigh. When I started storing again, the feeling was even less bearable now that I had that complete bliss to compare it to.

“Always a drawback with you powers, isn’t there.”

Though at least with other parahumans it was less obvious. Velocity didn’t have to spend hours and hours moving slower than a slug to achieve runs of over three-hundred miles-per-hour. Instead, he just hit more softly the faster he went. I would trade my steel for that in a heartbeat. No charging time, no having to carry around a clunky ball of metal, just will yourself to move and you’re faster than Alexandria.

“Don’t worry, I still love you,” I said a bit drunkenly to the metal ball on my bed.

I laughed again. My steel-mind didn’t care. Feruchemy didn’t want to be used, not like Allomancy or its mirror. It just sat there, empty or full or something in between, and existed.

If I were comparing powers, then I’d say the closest parahuman to me that I knew about in any detail was Battery, and to a lesser extent Assault. They both needed to charge their powers, though in different ways. Battery had to hold still for several seconds at a time, and in exchange she got super strength, speed, invincibility, and electricity powers. If I could do that, I could fill my steel-mind and maybe a pewter-mind incredibly quickly. At that thought, Allomancy’s dark opposite prodded at my thoughts. Hemalurgy didn’t actually whisper seductively to me, it just felt like it did because I knew that if I chose the right spike, I could impale that power right out of Battery. Not that I ever would—and besides, I knew it would be a pale shadow of what it was in her, reduced in scope to only be able to enhance one attribute; only the speed, or strength, for example. I shook off the thought, determined to ignore that aspect of my power no matter how useful it could be. I was comparing powers, not plotting how I’d steal them.

I put images of spikes out of my mind. Assault, he was another cape in the Bay who stored and used some attribute, though instead of straight speed or strength, he used kinetic energy, slamming himself against bullets or buildings or Battery’s punches and flying off to smack down villains. Like every other non-Tinker cape, he and Battery stored within their own batteries instead of a metalmind.

Which made me think. People would notice if I got piercings all over my body, but if no one could see my metalminds or hover over me with a metal detector, everyone would just assume that my power was innate, same as everyone else. And with enough health stored in Dad’s ring, a bit of surgery would be no big deal. I knew there were people who had metal knee or hip replacements, though those were usually titanium. If I couldn’t have metal directly implanted under my skin for some reason, I could see about maybe replacing my nails with metal, or fixing some to my teeth so that it looked like some hideous fashion statement instead of the source of my power. Emma was wrong about a lot, but there was a grain of truth in every hurtful word. I wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice what little I had in the looks department if it made me a more effective hero.

The door opened. “Taylor? You up?”

I stopped storing and instead tapped a tiny stream of health, putting me at about a hundred and ten percent of normal. It was enough for me to get over any residual sickness or dizziness from spending the day in bed. I went downstairs, where Dad had been waiting. He looked a bit … apprehensive.

“How was work?” I said.

He set his work bag down on the counter. “I spent the day at the Protectorate Headquarters.”

“Why … the Wards?” I guessed.

He grimaced. “Look, Taylor, I’m not going to go behind your back and sign you up if you don’t want to join. I just wanted to get a look at what your options would be.”

I nodded, twisting the ring around my finger. Dad just wanted me to be safe, that was all, and if he wanted me to join the Wards … well, I wouldn’t promise anything, but I’d at least check the place out. It was the least I could do.

He continued, interrupting my thoughts. “Did you know that you qualify as a Tinker? I didn’t tell them how your power worked and made sure to couch all my questions as hypotheticals, but they picked up the gist of what I was asking and promised to provide a workshop and funding for at least a Tinker three rating, no matter what yours actually turns out to be. That’s a lot of money Taylor—three-hundred-thousand a year, not including personalized lab equipment and your basic Wards salary.”

“So it’s a bribe, then.”

He hesitated. My anger was mostly for show, though—it was hard to feel too upset with the stream of health perking me up and making me light on my feet and ready to take on the world. I had to actively resist drawing more by telling myself I had to save the reserves for when I needed to heal from an actual injury.

“They offered a tour, didn’t they.”

Dad looked startled, but it was easy enough to guess. I’d looked up experiences with the Wards recruitment tactics on PHO, both from people who’d accepted and rejected the offers. Parahumans were rare enough that arranging a personal meeting with a prominent local hero wasn’t out of the question.

“Yes—and a letter,” he said.

He took an envelope out of his pocket and handed it to me. I turned it over. It was addressed to C. Jane. I snorted. Assault must have had a hand in it. I skimmed it to get the gist, then reread it more slowly. There was the standard corporate non-apology in there to make sure no one could use a lawyer to claim it was an admission of guilt, an offer to “work this out together” so that they could avoid having an attempt at bribery on paper, but below all that was a short message signed by Armsmaster.

_ Lung’s rampage cut our first meeting short. I have arranged my schedule so that we can talk again tomorrow. You are free to refuse. If you come, I have high hopes that we can learn something from each other. Tinkers usually synergize well. _

“Well, that’s something.” I elaborated on seeing my Dad’s questioning look. “Armsmaster invited me to talk, and sort of implied we could do some Tinkering together.”

Which … probably wouldn’t amount to anything seeing as how my ‘Tinkering’ actually worked, but it couldn’t hurt to cooperate with the PRT’s request. It’d make me look like less of a threat if I appeared eager to do what they wanted, and ingratiating myself with the organization would hopefully let me call in some backup when I needed it if I struck out on my own as a hero.

Dad frowned. “Don’t think you have to join. If it makes you uncomfortable, I already have the contact information of a few rogues who said they’d be happy to show a new cape the ropes. It’s more work, as you have to set up your own business and find a way to use your powers to make money, but if anyone can do it it’s you.”

“You know what … I’ll check it out. It could be interesting,” I said, and resolved to charge a few steel flakes with speed. Maybe Armsmaster could find something to do something with them.


	8. 1.8—Awakening

I was ready. Baggy pants hid the steel-mind in my pocket, and I’d slipped a vial of steel flakes into an old coat I used to wear. The ring buzzed on my finger, drawing a constant stream of health from me. It was only about ten percent, just enough to make me feel under the weather but not draining enough that I couldn’t act normally.

Neither of us spoke during the trip to the Protectorate HQ. Dad was focused on the road, and I was nervous. I’d faced down Lung, and I’d already met Armsmaster before, but it felt like this time I was meeting him for real, like what I did would matter.

I busied myself with taking out my vial of steel flakes and putting my finger inside, then storing speed whenever one of them brushed my skin. It made the car ride pass by much faster. I only stopped after we got to the force field bridge that led to the refitted oil rig.

There were a few tourists milling about in the lobby. When I said my name to the agent at the desk, he pushed a button and a trooper came to lead me away. Dad tried to follow us, but the agent said he couldn’t come. I was ready to press the issue, but he just smiled and told me he’d wait for me in the lobby. The faceless trooper walked through a small door behind the desk with a steady stride, helmet always facing forward. I wondered if they all trained to be robots, or if it was just something they naturally did. The next room was plain, the only thing that stood out a small niche on the wall with a mask inside. The trooper took it and handed it to me.

It seemed pointless to try to hide my identity by now. The PRT knew my name, my face, and a good portion of my Allomantic powers already from my notebook. I put the mask on anyway. I did feel less exposed, so there was that. The fewer people who saw the face of Taylor Hebert the better.

We walked through blank hallways with small Roomba-like robots trailing around the floor and clinging to the walls, their passage stripping away everything except the metal itself. Occasionally, we came across uniformed PRT workers who looked at us, saw my mask, and then looked away. It reminded me of school, where anyone who wasn’t fully on board with the Trio’s bullying averted their eyes as if not seeing it made it not real. The trooper opened a door that was indistinguishable from every other one and we entered a small chamber.

This area was more decorated, with three futuristic-looking elevators surrounded by pictures of every hero currently working the Protectorate East-North-East division and quite a few who had left the Bay for some reason or other. I recognized Green Girl, who’d become famous after it got out that her powers changed depending on what the closest people to her thought they were. A combination of angry villains and online trolls had decided to believe as hard as they could that her power was to be green. She’d retired after that. Next to her picture was a poster-sized image of Mecha Wolf, who’d transferred away after Hookwolf became a big name in Brockton Bay. Before I could put names to the rest of the faces, the trooper had pushed a button and middle elevator door slid open with a pleasant ding.

There was no acceleration, which weirded me out at first. Then again, the entire rig was tinkertech. Why would they spare any expense on the elevators? We entered another stretch of hallways, except these were less harshly-lit and the doorways had symbols above them. The trooper stopped before a thick door with the silhouettes of a wrench and bolt above it, and rung a buzzer to the side of it.

After a few minutes, I started to fidget. What if Armsmaster was out? The gangs had been sniping at each other recently. That was my fault, in an indirect way. It was common knowledge that Lung took longer to transform when he’d recently been on the rampage, and he was one of only two parahuman members in the ABB. Maybe they’d gotten in another shootout and Armsmaster had been needed to put a stop to it.

I was just about to start storing steel when the door opened. Armsmaster was more imposing than I remembered. His blue and white power armor gave him the feeling of one of those huge arm machines that were used to make cars, except alive and intelligent.

“You came. Smart of you. You should never turn down a chance to look at another Tinker’s tech.”

I nodded hesitantly. He turned around and went back inside, ignoring me. I gave the PRT trooper a questioning look, then remembered that he was basically a robot in a fancy suit and walked in after Armsmaster. The trooper stayed outside as the door slid shut behind us. I looked around with wide eyes.

Four compact machines stood against the far wall, vents on top glowing red with heat. Below them, tiny arms and spindles moved with deceptive speed, manipulating dull gray material the same color as the machines, working on creating objects in various stages of completion. In the middle of the room was a raised slab of thick rubber, one of Armsmaster’s signature halberds laying with its guts exposed. Wrenches and hammers and sharp-looking knives were arranged around the table in neat little slots designed to fit them exactly. Stacked in a corner were five crates that looked like they’d come out of a video game. Placed on a ledge against one of the walls was a metal cube with a grill on its face.

“You can make things that Tinker for you? I thought that was impossible.”

“No. Something about the Tinkering process defies all attempt at artificially replicating it. These are my own versions of 3D printers. They make the mundane parts, allowing me to spend my time more efficiently by putting them together instead of making each part individually.”

“And that?” I said, pointing at the metal cube.

“Blast furnace. For when I need to make a unique part without reprogramming my nano-forges,” he said.

Apparently content to ignore me, he clomped over to where his halberd rested and peered at its insides, muttering to himself.

“Don’t touch anything. The automatic defenses are primed to go off on a hair-trigger.”

All right then. I backpedaled away from the furnace and glared at his back. “So, why am I here? I thought we were supposed to share tech or something.”

He grunted. “Tinkers all follow the same general progression. First, you start with a few blueprints in your mind that you can make with no problem. Then you get creative and nearly blow yourself up by trying to combine your tech with nothing but a whim and instinct. After that, you study parahumans and other Tinkers’ work and incorporate into your own. So far, you have devices that grant you enhanced speed and some sort of antigravity. All tinkertech is based on the same general principles, and I’ve already learned all I can from Velocity and Kid Win. This visit is for your benefit, not mine.”

I frowned. I’d have been happy to keep the specifics of my power hidden, but apparently the reason he hadn’t asked about it was that he didn’t think it was good enough for him to bother with.

“This is for my benefit? Then can I use your furnace and any metal you happen to have around here?” I said.

He put down what looked like a tiny pair of pliers, which looked almost comical in his huge gauntleted fist, and picked up the smallest crate and then moved it over to the blast furnace. The helmet hid his expression, but something about the way he moved said he was distinctly annoyed.

I smiled and tugged at the top of the crate, then after seeing the high-tech seal looked for some kind of release latch. Armsmaster was known for his grumpiness and terse replies, but he was just so genuine about his desire to make the city a better place that everyone couldn’t help but forgive him for it.

Eventually, I found the release button beneath a sticky note.  _ Standard Tinker materials—basic metals and alloys. _ Something about the low-tech solution of slapping on a label to the overengineered container made me laugh, which cut off as soon as the crate opened.

So much metal. There were ingots of iron and steel, and though the steel wasn’t the right alloy the iron was perfect. There was copper and tin and aluminum and even a small sample of pure gold. Hidden away in the stacks of metal I found a bar of cadmium, which I needed, so I picked it up and set it aside. It took longer to find the right alloy of brass. There were three different alloys in the crate, and the kind I needed—ninety percent copper and ten percent zinc was the smallest of the three. I plucked it out and smiled. Armed with cadmium in one hand and brass in the other, I strode up to the boxy furnace and pressed the button on the side. A red glow came to life inside, but somehow the heat didn’t radiate beyond the grill. Tinkertech: physics are optional.

I unlatched the bit of metal keeping the grill in place, and a wave of heat rushed out. Armsmaster cursed.

“Why would you do that? The temperature shock will require me to recalibrate several components, and messing with the blast furnace while it’s on could kill you.”

Well, he certainly had his priorities in order. “Don’t worry, I can deal with the heat. I need direct access to it for my Tinkering,” I said.

He grumbled. “A secondary Breaker power? Unless your resistance is high enough that you can touch lava you will still die.”

Taking that as acceptance, I stored heat into my brass-mind and opened the grill all the way. A wave of heat flooded the room, then bounced against a flickering blue light that appeared around it. Looked like Armsmaster had included some precautions in case the furnace went supernova. I took a step closer, drastically increasing the flow of heat to my metalmind, and immediately got a faceful of pleasantly cool air. I sputtered for a moment, then opened my mouth and stored cadmium. The blast of air went from annoying to necessary as it felt like the oxygen was sucked right out of my lungs. I stood there as long as I could, taking great gasping gulps of air and storing huge amounts of heat inside the brass ingot. After about ten minutes I couldn’t take it any longer and shut the grill, sliding the latch back over it, and shut it off.

Armsmaster stared at me. I gave him a cheery wave and sidled back over to the crate of metals, looking over my options. I needed something flashy, something he wouldn’t just dismiss as having seen it all before. With the selection before me, I could make just about any alloy I wanted. Pewter, that would do it. I grabbed tin and lead. The alloy I needed was ninety-one percent tin and nine percent lead, but before I started working on that I needed a favor.

“Hey Armsmaster, can you cut a bit of brass off of this?” I said, holding the metal out toward him.

He was giving me a look, even if I couldn’t see it. But eventually he sighed and a blade popped out of his gauntlet and sliced a penny-sized portion off as if he were cutting through butter. I stared, then tore my gaze away from his fist as the blade retracted and weighed the piece of brass in my palm. The store of heat inside was less, a fraction of what was in the larger piece. It was perfect. I held the tiny nugget of brass and the cadmium ingot in my left hand, then slid my sleeve down over my right and grabbed the larger piece of brass without touching it.

There were a few reasons for this whole display. I wanted to have cordial relations with the PRT, but even if they treated me like a person now, I knew how quickly friends could turn to enemies. They were making a file with how they thought my powers worked, and if it looked like I had to specially prepare each piece of metal I used, then the next time they threw me in a cell they wouldn’t bother keeping me from any pieces of metal. The other reason was pure practicality. If I shaped this metal and made it ‘mine’ then there was a chance they’d let me keep it, especially if I made another metalmind for the PRT and just gave it away. A store of heat and breath would let me shape and purify just about any metal, and with the knowledge of metalworking in my head from my power I could also make any alloy with common sources of scrap.

I drew heat from the penny-sized piece of brass. It washed out of my body and the sourceless blue forcefield flared to alive around me again accompanied by Armsmaster’s grunt of annoyance. My clothes and the metalminds clutched in my hand didn’t even register the heat, as they were directly touching my skin, but the brass ingot in my sleeve deformed with a slight squeeze. I leaned forward and breathed out, tapping cadmium and letting out a stream of oxygen. I smiled and molded it into a bracer around my left forearm. It took longer than it should have due to the awkwardness of using my sleeve, instead of having been prepared and bringing a glove, but I managed and soon had the metal wrapped around my arm. A few more minutes spent touching it up so it didn’t look like I’d just slapped it onto my wrist and I had a bracer that looked like it had been fitted for my arm. Then I abandoned the small piece of brass and used the larger metalmind to shape the cadmium around my other arm. A few deft touches of the silvery metal to allow me to tap the oxygen within it in between the stages of shaping and I had a matching bracer of silvery metal.

My eyes flicked to the side and I grinned. Not worth it, eh? He’d been watching me work the whole time. Creating and shaping the pewter went faster, as if I’d spent a lifetime working metal and was starting again after a long period of taking a break from it. Instincts awakened, and soon I had four pewter rings arrayed in front of me. I slid one on my finger, next to Dad’s ring, two into my pockets, and then spent a few minutes storing half my strength within the remaining pewter ring. It was weird to feel my muscles, already not anything to brag about, shrunken and withered. But then it was done, and I gave the ring to Armsmaster.

“I’ll trade you the metal I took in return for this. It makes you stronger, though I’m not sure if you can actually use it,” I said.

“I’ll have to contact the director,” he said.

It took a while for him to get a response, but in the end I got to keep the metal.

Then I had to meet the Wards.


	9. 1.9—Awakening

Arsmaster escorted me out of his workshop, staring at the pewter ring I’d given him the whole time. The Wards weren’t located in the rig anymore. PHO didn’t know why that was, but the general consensus was that the reason was rooted in politics. If someone wanted to see them, they normally had to go all the way back across the force field bridge and then go to the PRT headquarters. However, Armsmaster said that they’d gathered here for training exercises.

I could feel Arsmaster glaring at the pewter-mind as we walked. Soon, he revealed an array of tools and diagnostic instruments that sprung out of his gauntlet. He poked and prodded the metal as I looked on. I wasn’t sure what I should hope for. If he found a way to unlock my metalminds so anyone could use them, then the Protectorate would want me for the Wards even more. And if they knew I could give powers to other people, they might start to suspect the existence of the third aspect of my powers. But I’d be able to give Dad a way to protect himself. He worried too much about me when I knew that the Empire had sent thugs down to the docks to rough some people up after Dad hired a few black dockworkers.

A blue fist curled around the pewter ring. Armsmaster growled. “When you make your items, do you push charges into them?”

“Uh, yeah, you could say that,” I said.

“If you held it longer, could you make it have more of an effect?”

“Sure. The only limit to how strong I could get with that is time and the size of the metal, and the metal would have to be really really small for that to matter. I can charge even a flake of metal a decent amount.”

I hadn’t even needed to give the vial of charged steel flakes to Armsmaster. I smiled as I felt the weight of my bracers. I could probably have bargained for even more metals, but the cadmium and brass metalminds were all I needed.

Armsmaster stiffened and stopped in place. I looked around, but we were in an empty stretch of hallway. Then the building shook, sending me to my knees. I groaned and pushed myself back up.

“What was that?”

“Head back to my lab. The automatic defenses will keep you safe,” he said and started moving again, completely ignoring my question.

He was walking quickly now. I broke into a jog and started panting less than a minute later. I really needed to exercise more. “If the rig is in danger, I really doubt that locking myself in a single room will help.”

His only response was to speed up even further. I grabbed one of the pewter rings I’d stuffed in my pocket. Did he really think leaving me behind was going to work? I left my steel-mind alone since I might need it depending on what was happening outside, but I had nothing stored in my pewter. I tapped brass and plucked a tiny fragment of pewter off of the ring, then swallowed it. It was unpleasant and would be poisonous for anyone one, but I bore it and waited.

A new well of power appeared. It felt different from steel, less placid, giving off a sense of constrained power. I burned it and immediately stood up straight. It was like a lightning bolt shot through me, filling me with crackling energy that made moving a process that almost didn’t even need thought. I easily kept up with Armsmaster where before I’d been struggling. Something about my posture was different, some new subconscious knowledge filling in for my inexperience. My pace was smooth and even, practiced. I couldn’t help the grin from spreading over my face. Enhanced reflexes? Yes, please.

“You’ve been conditionally cleared to participate,” Armsmaster said.

The monotone voice was fine. You don’t have to make your displeasure that clear.

“Oni Lee is in the cells at the lowest level of the building. Lung and a new Tinker are assaulting the rig. The new cape is called Bakuda. She specializes in bombs.”

“Wait, wait, hold on. Why is Oni Lee here? Shouldn’t he be in the Birdcage if you’ve captured him?”

“He should be. A transport is scheduled to arrive soon. News of his capture was suppressed in the hopes that any breakout attempt would be too late.”

I was feeling a little apprehensive by now. The thought that two capes could be a credible threat to every hero in the Bay at the same time was a scary one. Lung had done it before, but they’d given him time to ramp up first, and even then he hadn’t been facing them on their home ground.

“Shouldn’t he be going after the transport or something? This is pretty blatant.”

“He fought Leviathan. That said, there is a reason he’s acting so openly. Most of my coworkers are currently at a function over in Chicago. Dauntless and I requested to stay behind in case of an emergency, but unless we find Lung before he transforms, we won’t be able to stop him.”

“And the Wards?”

There was a period of silence. I guessed that he was using his helmet to find out for himself. I wished there was a metal I could burn that would give me internet access. Relying on someone else to drip-feed information was frustrating.

“They will also participate.”

A door slid open ahead of us. Armsmaster stepped in first, and I entered feeling like I was seeing a promotional poster for a movie. Dauntless was talking to Piggot in a low voice. Gallant had a hand on Vista’s shoulder as she looked out of a wide window. Aegis, Kid Win, and a new Ward—Browbeat, that was his name—were clustered together but broke apart when they saw us come in. Clockblocker was standing apart from the others and just gave us a single look before turning back to the view outside.

Piggot spoke. “Now that you’re all here, we can begin. Armsmaster, head out with Dauntless. He knows the plan, he’ll tell you about it on the way. Jane, you’ll be part of Aegis and Kid Win’s group. Go.”

As if to punctuate her statement, a wall of flame obscured the view outside. The force field flickered and the lights dimmed, the fire hungrily lunging forward before the shimmering dome reinstated itself.

Aegis flew over to me. He was tall, and the flight didn’t make that factor go away. “Calamity Jane? Didn’t think you’d let Assault of all people name you. Sorry to rush the introduction, but Bakuda’s trying to turn the PHQ into rubble. You and Kid Win can follow me; I had to memorize the layout of this place when I took this position.”

He darted toward a door and barreled down a hallway, Kid Win hopping on his hoverboard and hovering close behind. I just burned pewter and sprinted, then grimaced as I felt that I’d already burned through almost a quarter of it. I went through the metal incredibly quickly.

“Dauntless and Armsmaster will act as a distraction. Lung will assume they’re the real threat. Gallant, Vista, and Browbeat are going to sneak around behind him and get Clockblocker in close so he can freeze the big guy. Meanwhile, we’re going after Bakuda. All three of us can fly to some degree, so we stand the best chance of getting her out of whatever minefield she’s surrounded herself with. If you see an opportunity, snatch her and bring her back to the rig. The PRT will deal with the unpowered gang members,” Aegis said.

With that, he finished fiddled with a latch on the ceiling and popped it open, then flew out. Alarms blared but then quickly fell silent. Intentional, or had Bakuda hacked into the rig’s systems? Kid Win followed Aegis, and I flared pewter, crouched down, and rocketed out onto the roof.

“There,” Kid Win said.

I followed his gesture and just barely made out a tiny figure in a jeep. That must be Bakuda. I gave his helmet an envious look. Tinkers could fit a ridiculous amount of random useful stuff into their gear. There was always another level of bullshit tech with them.

I squinted at the scene below. Bakuda held up a long tube. A moment later, a rocket shot out and hit the force field, then stopped, unmoving. The force field glowed ominously, then all of a sudden flickered out of existence again, and the rocket fell straight down. This time, the field didn’t come back up. I wished I had tin. Most fliers had some sort of visual enhancement so they could see and react in time while flying, so Aegis could probably follow what was going on just fine, and Kid Win had his tech. I strained my ears and heard nothing, then gunshots. Two figures advanced toward the jeep, and a group of people around it fired at them.

“Alright, they’re distracted. I don’t see Lung anywhere, so the other group probably has him pinned down. Let’s go,” Kid Win said.

Aegis nodded and the two flew off. I sighed and wished I’d brought iron or just another vial of steel. The distance was just too far for me to survive the fall, even while flaring pewter. I took the vial I’d brought with me out of my coat and stared at it. Fishing out each flake and drawing the steel from it would take too much time, but burning them with speed inside probably wouldn’t work. I remembered trying to Push my steel-mind. That kind of force wouldn’t be anywhere near what I needed.

I shrugged and downed the contents of the vial. If it worked, great. If it didn’t, well, I had a good amount of speed I hadn’t used. I burned steel and felt a mountain of power. The world slowed, and slowed, and slowed until it was way beyond what I was used to. I wasn’t just fast, I was the only thing moving in a world that stood still. I dumped a massive amount of speed into my steel-mind but it just kept coming.

A word appeared in my mind, the part of my power that was pure information flaring to life and inserting something it had kept hidden so far straight into my head.

_ Compounding _ .


	10. 1.10—Awakening

My super speed had done nothing to help the range or power of Allomantically burning steel, so interfering with Bakuda’s equipment from here was unfeasible, but if I could Compound speed I was sure there was a way to increase my Allomantic power the same way. In the absence of an assured way to do that, though, I decided to get over to the action the normal way: by walking.

Getting back down from the top of the PHQ building was laughably easy. I wandered around and got lost for what for me was about an hour’s worth of time. At first, I had trouble dealing with the air resistance and almost burned my skin off before I dumped the heat into brass. After that, it just became an annoyance. Every time I was close to running out of speed, all I had to do was tap brass and pinch off a bit of steel from my first metalmind and store my remaining speed within the nugget of metal before swallowing it. I had infinite speed, so long as I didn’t run out of steel.

Infinity is a hard word to comprehend, but I could actually feel how much speed I had on some gut level of instinct. I was tapping so much that the world appeared completely frozen to me. That was easy enough to do with zinc, but doing the same with steel meant that I was going so fast that I was wasting more than half of that speed by tapping so much at the same time. Moving twice as fast used all the power from the steel-mind, and so did moving four times as fast, or even eight times. A little after that, though, you started to waste increasing amounts of power for smaller amounts of return. And for me, it didn’t even matter.

I wandered around the building. I got completely turned around and lost within minutes, but I didn’t care. It didn’t matter when to the rest of the world, it had been less than a second since I’d started tapping. After a while, muscling through the air resistance got annoying enough that I tore another bit of pewter off one of the rings I’d made, stored some strength inside, and then burned that to move around more easily and tear my way through a few doors that kept blocking my path. Punching them around a bit was really cathartic. I learned to shove the Allomantic and Feruchemical processes to the back of my mind, Constantly Compounding strength and speed while storing brass to make sure I didn’t fry myself while moving around. It became something I paid as much attention to as I did to walking.

I’d been hoping to stumble across Armsmaster’s lab again. I’d seen a small bar of gold in that crate, and I wasn’t about to cannibalize Dad’s ring for infinite healing. I wasn’t worried too worried about the Protectorate trying to get payment for anything I took in a moment of crisis, and I had to admit to myself that I may have been a bit drunk on power. I came across the lobby first though. Dad was there, frozen mid-conversation with the agent at the front desk.

Suddenly, everything became more real. It didn’t matter that time was effectively paused to me, I was fooling around with metal when the rig’s force field was down and one more bomb would start killing people. The entrances were locked down, but I was Compounding strength. A casual backhand started the process of flinging the door off its hinges, but then I remembered it wouldn’t conveniently start going anywhere any time soon and tore a me-sized hole with a few more swipes.

I stepped outside and looked down at my hands, flexing them into fists. Infinite strength. I didn’t literally have an infinite amount right at that moment, but with a large enough metalmind I could get close enough that it wouldn’t matter. And if I did that … could I take on the Siberian?

Probably not. She was something else. Alexandria was invulnerable, and the Siberian had torn her eye out. Better capes than I had tried doing something about her and failed, so it wasn’t going to be an application of brute force that brought her down, no matter how excessive.

I lowered myself just above the water. I didn’t want to strand myself in midair as I waited fruitlessly for gravity to reassert itself, so I made sure my feet could reach the waves. A kick against the concrete behind me—oops, had I shattered it?—and I was sailing over the Bay. I idly kicked at a wave as I flew onward. It rippled and distorted beneath my foot, but my flight path changed and I was now soaring at a slight upward angle. I caught myself on a building behind the arrayed forces of the ABB.

Bakuda was in her jeep, posing as she slid another projectile into her rocket launcher, but the gang members looked oddly … human. There were craters where bombs they’d flung had exploded, and patches of ice or distorted space that reinforced the fact that a Tinker had made them, but they were facing the PRT, and the PRT weren’t playing around. Foam sprayers were set aside, ineffective at this range. Instead, the troopers had rifles and handguns and even a few pieces of tinkertech weaponry. The faceless troopers were gunning down the ABB with precision, and the gang members had looks of terrified desperation on their faces even as they returned fire with their own weapons.

Why were they doing this? Was Lung really scary enough that they couldn’t say no to going on what amounted to a suicide mission? There were dozens of guys here, and even the most dedicated of them should have hesitated before agreeing to this. I poked one of them in the chest, then grimaced as my finger sunk in deeper than I’d meant it to. Oops. Had to get used to my strength. I spend some not-time carefully twisting guns into uselessness, and hesitated before deciding to deal with the bombs. Some of them had exotic effects I wasn’t sure I could handle, but I was the only one who could contain the regular wash of heat from the explosion with my brass and react in time to smack all the superheated metal fragments from the air. If I had to choose between me and the PRT facing them, I couldn’t in good conscious choose the unpowered troopers. Some of them I squeezed into powder, others I ran my fingers through, and if I could get a clear shot I’d backhand them out of existence. None of them exploded, so either they didn’t have time to activate or they were duds without being triggered properly. I really really hoped it was the latter.

As I headed toward the jeep, I caught sight of Aegis and Kid Win. They were already almost halfway here, but Bakuda’s next shot was aimed right at them. I grabbed the middle of the launcher and squeezed.

Then I was sort of stumped. Trying to move her at this speed would just kill her. Not that I really cared all that much. She’d been aiming tinkertech bombs at the building with my Dad inside it. It was just … I had her completely at my mercy. I could kill her by pushing her too hard with my pinkie. It seemed wrong to just end her life when she wasn’t a threat.

Maybe once she knew her position I could get her to surrender?

I looked at the bag of missile heads beside her. Those would have to go. I slapped them, and a portion of the jeep, into powder. Then I had to deal with the missile head Bakuda had in her hand. I could simply take her hand off at the wrist, but the Protectorate might think that was too brutal, especially when I had other options. A bit of consideration and I poked a finger through it.

I checked the surroundings. The ABB members were all faced outwards, and even if they were looking at me they’d be more distracted by their weaponry all being torn apart. If they tried to dogpile me they’d be a problem to avoid without killing them, so I’d have to convey Bakuda’s plight to her before she shouted for reinforcements. I looped around the area to make sure there wasn’t a sniper or something I missed, and during my little trip I finally caught sight of Lung. He was frozen mid-lunge, a clawed hand flinging Gallant away as he dodged Clockblocker. Browbeat was in the middle of flinging a dumpster at him, and Vista was on a nearby rooftop with a look of intense concentration on her face, a stream of billowing fire splitting as it moved away from her. They looked like they had it under control, and without access to zinc or brass there wasn’t much I could do to help without maybe killing him. Having an arm torn off would only make him grow faster. I wound up back in front of Bakuda. The area was clear. I stored speed.

A lot of speed.

The mountain of power within me was slowly siphoned off into my steel-mind. Bakuda reacted.

I fell to the ground, twitching and screaming.

Gold. Gold would help, gold would save me. I desperately clutched at gold, tapping and tapping and tapping until it was gone and it didn’t work the pain was still there and my gold was gone my gold was gone—

I tapped, stored, flailed about. My nerves sent confusing signals that I couldn’t interpret. None of my metalminds could make the pain go away but burning more and more pewter into strength made it a little more bearable as muscles grew and whatever it was had to affect more of me. It was enough for me to ask how. I hadn’t seen any other bombs in the area. Had she hidden something in her costume? Then a fresh wave of sheer pain washed over me and I thrashed about some more, reaching for gold and finding it empty. I yanked on pewter, tapping it harder than ever before, and stored steel then tapped it, stored it and tapped it.

When I came to, time was frozen again. I blinked away tears and wiped them away. The action put a smear of something wet across my face. My vision cleared, and I stared.

It was a massacre.


	11. 1.11—Awakening

My steel ran out, and a sourceless wash of hot air blew over me. I absently stored it in my brass-mind.

“Cal—”

“Let’s drop that first part, Kid Win. Jane? Jane, what happened? Are you alright?” The words were slow and calm.

A spark of something jumped from me. Another aspect of my powers I hadn’t even known existed. I turned away from the carnage, but I still saw everything in my mind’s eye. The wrecked jeep, now in pieces. Bakuda was … there. Fragments of her armor sprayed everywhere, chunks torn out of the ground, gouges where my limbs had passed while I burned pewter.

“I think I missed a bomb somewhere,” I said. It was hard to hear my voice over the ringing in my ears.

“…Yeah. A few of the unpowered ABB had some sort of pain grenades. I think she got you with one. Tinkers are really good at hiding tech until they need it,” Aegis said.

He kept talking in his low, rumbly voice, but I wasn’t listening anymore. He and Kid Win were hovering above me. Aegis hid it well, but they were positioned to dart away at the slightest sign of aggression. Not that it would help them if I did decide to attack.

I looked back at the carnage. The PRT was foaming the now unarmed ABB members. None of the bombs had gone off after I destroyed them, which I’d been fervently hoping would be the case. Placing them into my personal envelope of speed would have required me to go back to normal speed to snatch them up, and dropping out of super speed had obviously been a mistake. Tinkertech was notoriously finicky and unreliable, with only the creator able to use it for long without it breaking down. Even tinkertech bombs relied on the same general principles, so I’d been pretty sure that poking holes in the ones that created more exotic effects would disable them, and with my brass and steel I could easily handle more conventional explosives.

“…and whatever you did created a bunch of shockwaves. It distracted Lung long enough for Clockblocker to tag him, and Armsmaster had some sort of super-sedative that put him down after that.”

I turned sharply to face him. “Shockwaves? Did anyone get hurt?”

“A few civilians suffered broken bones, but nothing life-threatening. Panacea will be here soon.”

Dad had been in the lobby when I blew past him. Broken bones. Going along life I had, ignorant of how my powers really worked, had almost killed Dad. I wasn’t limited to whatever I put in my metalminds. I was almost certain I could enhance my Allomancy similarly. The limits of my power seemed almost made to be broken. I hadn’t wanted to give Dad a Hemalurgic spike, but if I couldn’t find a way to ‘jailbreak’ my metalminds so others could use them, I’d seriously consider trying to make a deal with the PRT so I could spike people on death row or something. Most types of metal spiked away certain Allomantic or Feruchemical powers, though. Maybe I could spike away a part of my own powers, then tap a gold-mind to heal it back? I got the feeling that gold could do that—gold was just ridiculous like that.

“You should come back to the rig. Piggot wants to talk to us about how the mission went. Since you ended up being a pretty big part of it, she’ll have some advice for you.”

Kid Win let out a strangled sound. “Advice?”

I agreed with Kid Win. Piggot didn’t have powers—she couldn’t, not while also being a director—but she still managed to be scary. Going to the talk would make me appear cooperative and I risked nothing by doing so, not while I was still Compounding pewter and could add steel to that in only a few moments, but I really didn’t want to. Saying I’d killed Bakuda would be an understatement.

“Fine. I need to see my Dad first, though.”

Aegis flew ahead and I walked, pulling off a pretty good imitation of the Siberian as I did so. Anything I applied any force to flat-out disintegrated. I siphoned off most of that strength to the pewter ring on my finger and reduced the burn of the pewter inside my stomach as low as I could, leaving me only a mere four times my usual strength.

Panacea was already inside the lobby when we reached it. Dad was standing off to the side, looking uncomfortable, while she healed someone in a PRT uniform. I started running when I saw him and caught what Panacea was saying.

“Broken femur, massive amounts of nerve and muscle damage, sprained ankle…”

I rushed up to Dad, then paused and stopped burning pewter before giving him a hug. He returned it and stood on tiptoes, nesting his head in my hair like he did when I was little. I giggled, then released him.

“Did you get hurt?”

Panacea turned toward us, but Dad spoke before she could. “Naw, just got a little scraped up. I’m fine now. These people she keeps healing are real troopers, though. Did you hear her diagnosis for this guy?”

I sighed in relief and gave him another hug which everyone carefully avoided noticing. That was confusing until I realized they were trying to spare my civilian identity. It was … nice of them, even though I knew the cameras in this place were recording everything.

“Coming, Jane?” Aegis said.

I followed him. He effortlessly navigated the featureless corridors, traveling in minutes what had taken me subjective hours to find my way through. I caught signs of my passage here and there, doors that were torn to small pieces and impaled in the walls, or had been scattered across the floor in my wake.

We were the last group to arrive. Aegis hid it well, but the rest of the Wards and even Dauntless showed some degree of discomfort towards me. Armsmaster just ignored me, and Piggot looked tired.

“This situation was a complete disaster. That said, none of you are at fault. Clockblocker, Vista, Gallant, and Browbeat, you’re to be commended for your actions when dealing with Lung. Jane … I strongly recommend you seek therapy. The PRT will provide it free of charge even if you don’t join the Wards. If you decide to join the Wards, you can stay for the next portion of this discussion.”

I stared dumbly for a moment. Was that really all she was going to say to me? I’d killed someone. I expected shouting, or some attempt at forcible recruitment, not … this. They tried to hide it, but I could feel eyes boring into my back as I left. My shoulder hunched inward. I pinched off a piece of metal from my steel-mind, which was starting to look warped and spikey, and stored speed in it until I had a good amount, then swallowed it.

This time I only burned enough to make the world slow down, making sure that I didn’t move fast enough to need to store brass. I suspected that actively forcing my way through the air created those shockwaves. Still, I made sure to steer clear of any people and let time resume whenever I needed to get past a door instead of beating past it. No one was there to guide me out, but after everything I’d done, they had to know I could find my own way out.

I slowed to a mere four times my usual speed as I entered the lobby, skirting around groups of people who slowly adopted looks of confusion at my passage. Panacea was still there, but healing gang members instead of PRT troopers now. I was tempted to ask her for healing—I ached everywhere, and was only standing because I had non-Feruchemically charged pewter burning—but I really didn’t want to interact with anyone for a while. And with steel, that while could happen in an instant. I slowly tapped more steel as I left the rig, sprinting across the restored force field bridge.

There were already people out here dealing with the aftermath. There was reflective tape stretched across the streets. Police officers stood beside cars with lights flashing, likely waiting for a cleanup crew to arrive. I walked up to the place where everything had gone wrong, then frowned in confusion.

The blood was still there, but any flesh was just … gone. Slim crystals stuck out of the ground at odd angles, small bits of silvery metal beading at the tips. I leaned down toward them and felt a resonance at the same time as cracks appeared throughout the closest crystals.

It was my pewter. My power was feeding me information again, and I grasped at it eagerly. These were atium crystals, and over time they would form beads of atium. Another metal, different from the rest. Special, somehow. Any Allomancy near the crystals would break them. I stepped back.

If capes died near me, their bodies turned into a new metal.


	12. 1.12—Awakening

The scattered atium crystals seemed to reflect more than the dim light from the old flickering bulb in the ceiling. I squinted at the tip of the crystals. The almost liquid beads of atium were a tiny bit larger than they had been yesterday. Not that that was saying much; even having grown, the tiny beads of atium were comparable to grains of sand.

I walked back upstairs before burning pewter, then sighed as the metal instantly made me feel comfortable in my own skin in a way I hadn’t since I was little. The atium crystals instantly shattered as soon as I used Allomancy near them, but after Panacea had healed me I’d been able to approach while Compounding steel and snatch up the unbroken crystals without them shattering, so they didn’t react to the use of Feruchemy. I suspected that was because Feruchemy was all about storing and tapping internal attributes, while Allomancy seemed to generate power from nothing—Feruchemical strength made my muscles physically grow larger, for example, while Allomancy just made me flatly stronger. Honestly, if Feruchemy had broken the crystals I wouldn’t have been able to take them with me. There was no way the PRT would have let me keep mysterious crystals that formed out of a bomb cape’s dead body, even if my power told me exactly what they were. Well, it mostly told me what they were. Atium was powerful, I knew that much, but my power gave me no hint of what the strange metal would actually do. I glanced at a clock. Still early enough for me to make dinner before Dad came home from work.

Today had been odd. I’d visited the Wards for real this time. They were about what I expected, except for Clockblocker. He was more solemn than I would’ve guessed, especially with his name. I was on the fence with whether I’d actually join them or not. They’d offered all sorts of metals, but since I still wasn’t going to school, I could scrape together anything I needed with my cadmium and brass metalminds, time, and a junkyard.

The door opened, and I tapped steel and set down two plates of mashed potatoes. “Hi, Dad.”

He had a worn smile as he plopped his bag down. “Hey. Have a good day?”

More small talk in that vein followed. For once, nothing terrible had happened all day and I could actually talk about it. I spoke in fits and starts, unused to elaborating without prompting, but eventually got through descriptions of the PRT building—the place where the Wards stayed until they joined the Protectorate and were moved to the rig—how strangely nice everyone had been, and a no-nonsense lecture from Armsmaster that had made more sense. As I talked, I got the sense that Dad was getting ready to tell me something. During a break in the conversation, he cleared his throat.

“So, you mentioned the composition of the sixteen metals you used. I got in contact with one of our suppliers, and today a salesperson gave me samples,” he said, going over to his work bag and taking out a plastic box-shaped container.

Dad set it down in front of me. “If these work for you, I’ll be putting in a bulk order.”

My eyes had been fixed on the container. Having all sixteen of the normal metals right in front of me had me close to salivating, but at his last words, I jerked my gaze back toward him. “A bulk order? But, how? Some of the metals are really, really expensive.”

He absently scratched at his neck. “Money isn’t worth anything if you don’t use it.”

“Dad?”

“You fought Lung, and then you fought a mad Tinker. Long-lasting nerve damage, several fractures, and Dauntless said he saw you writhing on the ground wrecking everything that got too close to you.”

“Ah … so you heard Panacea’s diagnosis.”

His eyes were hard, the set of his shoulders rigid and determined. No matter the cost, he was going to ship in actual, pure gold as well as all the other fifteen metals in bulk because I needed them. I let out a long, shaky sigh, and nodded. I was just going to have to move up money-making on the list.

Later that night, I sat on my bed and opened the container. I took a breath as I saw every metal, neatly arrayed in front of me. There was tin, copper, brass, iron, zinc, steel, pewter, and bronze, laid in separate sections in one half of the box. Then there was a small chunk of gold. I immediately took it out and pinched off a bit, then started filling it with as much health as I dared. I grimaced as everything ached. Minutes passed, and I finally had enough and threw it down my throat, and burned gold.

The little aches and annoyances of the day faded away, small things that had made me antsy even under the effects of pewter. My skin buzzed, I almost felt like I was glowing with sheer health, and a lazy smile spread across my face. I could definitely get used to this. A river of excess health flowed from me to Dad’s ring, with enough left over for me to still enjoy the effects. I repeated the effects of Compounding a few more times, until the golden ring couldn’t hold the sheer amount of health, then poured the rest into the gold chunk. I examined the rest of the metals while I was at it.

I already had a cadmium bracer around one arm, so I put that silvery metal out of my mind for the moment. Bendalloy, or Wood’s metal, really earned that second name. I handled it and stored until my stomach complained, then tapped until I was full again. I tried storing water, and sure enough, my mouth went dry. That was useful enough, but not really a noticeable hero ability. I pinched off a bit to turn.

Everything outside of a bubble of space five feet or so was slower. I judged it to be about an eighth of normal speed when I compared it to the effects of steel. I glanced at zinc, but put that aside for later. I had more exotic metals to try. Electrum was a combination of silver and gold, and when I stored I felt … sluggish. I tried pushing more into it, but eventually, I just didn’t see the point anymore and stopped storing entirely. I frowned and tapped. My next actions became clearer, more focused. I tried burning a bit of it with Allomancy and took note of a shadow that appeared to the right of my head. I turned, and it disappeared. The shadow person leaped out of me and looked around before disappearing. I jumped after it and then extinguished my electrum when I realized what had happened. The shadow showed my future self. Useful for avoiding surprises, so it might be worth keeping it burning constantly. I felt a brief curiousness for what gold would do. I shrugged and tried it. I’d avoided it so far because its Allomantic use gave me a bad feeling, but while tapping electrum that felt silly.

There was another me looking back.

She was happy. Carefree. She was me, and she knew me just as I knew her. Her Emma had never betrayed her, and she was dismayed that mine had, and hated what I’d gone through. She would join the Wards in a heartbeat and relentlessly make friends and chatter at the other Wards until their ears fell off.

I’d forgotten what I was like, back then. Repressed it, almost. I reached out toward her and she disappeared when I touched her. I reeled back and fell into a fit of shuddering that didn’t stop even when I tapped brass.

And finally, I cried. Emma. I’d put her out of my mind, as far away as I could, and now she was back. I pulled on electrum, but it had run dry. I’d often asked what had happened at first, before I’d tried ignoring her. That other me wanted to know. She was curious, and sad, but she wasn’t afraid to ask. She hadn’t experienced two years of constant pranks and pointing and laughter, she hadn’t dealt with the workshop.

She was the better version of me, the one that had stopped existing long ago.

I sniffed. “Fine. I’ll try to find out.”

In an effort to distract myself, I pulled out a metal at random. Nicrosil. It looked like steel at a glance. I touched it, and felt … options. Thirty-four of them, each paired with a part of my powers. Seventeen for each aspect of Allomancy, seventeen more for Feruchemy. At first I was confused at that number, then I remembered the atium crystals in the basement. Hemalurgy was mysteriously absent. I didn’t know what to make of that; was Hemalurgy just unwilling to let itself be stored, somehow? Or was I unable to store it because it was a part of my power that was based primarily on knowledge?

I stored my Allomantic ability to use brass. Emotional manipulation was something I could stand losing—but after I stopped storing the ability returned. It looked like storing abilities worked like storing any normal attribute did: there was a baseline level of strength it had, and storing it would make it weaker until I stopped storing, at which point it bounced back to normal. I took a bit of brass and burned it without storing anything in it to try it out. I felt people around me, but the number and location were blurry, like when you looked out through a glazed window. Shame. It would’ve been helpful to have a people radar. I stored brass Allomancy again, and that radar shrunk.

I frowned and tapped brass, taking off a bit of nicrosil. Why not? I swallowed it and burned. My range grew immensely, and I could tell the strength of the ability did as well. Before, I could have dampened emotions in a select few, or made a large group feel mildly depressed. Now, making everyone for blocks around me feel completely dead inside would be as easy as giving them a mental nudge.

That should not be so easy. I quickly burned the rest of the nicrosil nugget and dumped the ability—the Investiture—in the metalmind.

Next, I turned my attention to aluminum.


	13. 1.13—Awakening

Aluminum. I wasn’t about to burn it Allomantically, not with the feeling of nothingness my power fed me when I thought about its function. But Feruchemy had safeguards. I couldn’t kill myself by storing too much of an attribute. Before I could think about it too much, I picked up the light piece of metal and stored. Nothing happened, so I gradually increased the rate until there was nothing left to store.

There was no reason to stop storing, so I didn’t. Duralumin was next. I stored within it as well. What I was putting within it wasn’t obvious, but without whatever I was putting inside aluminum it was easier to sort of … feel the change. Connection, that’s what my power told me this was. Aluminum made me feel neutral, but while storing connection the room felt like a stranger’s. The feeling of power and then nothingness connected to its Allomantic use probably made it some sort of suicide metal—gain a burst of power, then die. Or fall asleep or something.

What next? Experiment. Find a way to give powers to Dad. Plan optimal strategies for fighting the gangs, both with and without a team. I would join the Wards, of course—I hadn’t wanted to before, but now my reasons seemed silly. Why would I turn down money, materials, and people who wanted the same things I did?

I took zinc. This was another emotional manipulation metal, like brass, but I didn’t plan to use it that way. I stored, and I felt really foggy. The room slowed, and I struggled to remember if it was supposed to do that. I looked down at the zinc. Yes, this was normal. I was … storing. Putting … mental speed. And acuity. Smartness? Something. I didn’t like this feeling. Something was wrong. I was supposed to know more, more quickly. Everything was confusing, and I couldn’t keep track of what I was doing. I stopped storing.

It was like coming out from deep underwater and taking a breath of fresh air. I could think now. That had been uncomfortable, and I should have been more introspective about what had just happened, but that seemed pointless so I just moved down my mental checklist and swallowed a pinch of zinc.

The world slowed much more readily than when I was burning steel and made it so much easier to think. My head was clear and my mind moved from thought to thought at the speed of lightning, picking up some ideas that held merit and discarding others.

_ Aluminum stores identity, identity can be used to resist mind control depending on source, Compound identity in preparation. Goal: sell powers, how? Hemalurgy infeasible, Feruchemy? Nicrosil stores power, test? _

I stopped burning zinc and picked up the piece of nicrosil charged with Allomantic brass ability and a bit of brass to go with it, then went downstairs.

“Dad! Come here, please, I want to try something,” I yelled from the kitchen.

I felt a vague sense of wrongness. Normally, I’d wait until he woke up, but that seemed pointless. Protecting Dad was on the checklist, and waking him up to test it was better done sooner than later.

He came a few minutes later, rubbing his eyes and yawning. “Taylor? You look … are you alright?”

“Hello, Dad. Try to use this metal. It is nicrosil. I have put the ability to dampen emotions within it,” I said, handing him the charged metal.

He frowned. “It’s … I can tell there’s something there, but it’s like a shadow. I can’t touch it. Taylor, you’re acting oddly.”

I took the nicrosil back and studied it. Maybe it only worked with Feruchemical abilities. I tapped the ability to use Allomantic brass until it was gone, then stored Feruchemical pewter and handed it back along with one of the pewter rings I’d made in Armsmaster’s workshop.

“Try now.”

“Taylor, what happened?”

“I am storing my identity. Everything is fine. Try tapping nicrosil.”

He didn’t look placated by my reassurance, but a moment later his muscles withered. It had worked. Why now, and not with the Allomantic ability? I burned charged zinc again, freezing the world and speeding my mind up until the conclusion was easy.

_ Allomantic brass storage was created without storing identity. Identity is linked to use of my abilities. Can store any power in nicrosil if also storing within aluminum. Identity linked to type of power one can use—provide another cape the ability to use aluminum and nicrosil, ask to store their own power. Can possibly use the power of every willing cape. _

Aluminum and nicrosil. That was the secret. I could sell powers. I could Compound them, making even the most useless-seeming power S-class. With enough Compounding, even someone like Parian could likely beat Behemoth. I stopped burning zinc, then after a bit of thought stopped storing aluminum. It had served its purpose.

“You can gift your powers to others? That’s amazing, Taylor.”

I hugged him. “Sorry for being all … weird. I was storing my identity, which … yeah.”

He sighed. “I know you want to experiment, just maybe do it with me nearby next time you try something new?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can do that,” I said.

I got an idea and told him about it. He was uncertain at first, but I eventually persuaded him by mentioning the existence of telekinetic capes who could just pull any metal off my body and leave me basically helpless. The heat would make crafting the item I wanted in my room a safety hazard, so he followed me down to the basement and carefully watched what I was doing, questioning me about every step. At first it was annoying, but once I got used to explaining what I was doing it was like a dam had burst. The young girl I’d seen while burning gold had a lot to do with that, if I was being honest.

I took the sixteen metals and arranged them in front of me. Nicrosil would be the core of the blend of metals I was making, so I split the chunk into thirty-four distinct pieces; one for every Allomantic and Feruchemicaly ability I had for each common metal, and an extra to account for whatever atium did. Then I arranged the rest of the metals around these sixteen chunks. Most of the rest of the metal I split in two pieces, one for the Allomantic ability and another for Feruchemy. The exceptions were tin and bendalloy. Feruchemically storing tin required a separate bit of metal for each sense, and I couldn’t store both food and water in the same piece of bendalloy so I split that into three pieces. Then I drew on the warmth in the brass bracer on my arm, being careful not to draw on cadmium as well. Adding oxygen would risk changing the composition of the metals.

What I wanted to do was simple. I couldn’t risk having my metals ripped away from me, and the only way to do that was to put them inside of me. But I didn’t want to just randomly stick metal all over me; I wanted a ball of mashed-together bits of metal that I could take out and change if I suddenly discovered new metals like atium, or if I needed to just add more metal if I found out that a certain store was too small. Dad handed me a pair of gardening gloves. I slipped them on and molded the bits of metal in between my hands like putty.

The actions were meditative, and before I knew it half an hour had passed and Dad’s eyes were sliding shut. I ended up with a ball of striated metal, different layers showing separate colors. I struggled over where to place it, then shrugged and figured that since I was Compounding gold, it didn’t really matter and I could perform impromptu surgery on myself with no negative aftereffects. Dad’s eyes shot open at that.

“No! Taylor, the pain that would cause might end with you having a chunk stuck in your heart or somewhere critical that you can’t remove until you run out of health and die.”

I grumbled a bit at that objection—no pain from mere surgery would compare to Bakuda’s pain grenade—but relented and went upstairs to look up places that doctors often implanted metal. The knee or hip looked promising, and I wouldn’t have to worry about dealing with the immune response it would cause as long as I had enough gold on me. Apparently, in some surgeries, bits of metal were combined with the bone.

Perfect. Dad was still uneasy, but he didn’t stop me when I took a knife, tapped pewter, and went to work on my knees. I had to use both since I’d need to flatten out the material and let it bond with the bone without also adding noticeable bulk to the area.

I winced when I started, but once the first reshaped bit of combined metal touched my skin I started storing my sense of touch away and relaxed. I almost stopped a few times, but given Dad’s reaction I didn’t think he’d let me do it again if I did stop, so I powered on through the disgust, layering heated metal over the bones in my knees. It was … quite a sight, but I’d seen the aftermath of my flailing around near Bakuda, and it was nothing compared to the sight that was now seared into my memory.

Burning gold sealed up the injuries like they’d never happened, fresh skin appearing on both legs. The blood didn’t disappear, though. I let my tin storage lapse, and felt no pain, but as soon as I stopped tapping brass the metal burned under my skin. I reminded myself that this was what I wanted, that it wasn’t actually injuring me, and it was important to get used to pain if I was going to be a hero, but before too long I stored my sense of touch in tin again. The feeling of metal fusing to your bones was extremely unpleasant, even if you constantly healed from any damage it did.

Despite the pain disgust at what I’d had to do, I smiled. I could feel every metal at once.


	14. 2.1—Synergizing

I don’t think it was egotistical of me to say that I was one of the most powerful capes in the Bay. I had Feruchemical ‘batteries’ stuck in my knees, and the gold there along with the storage in Dad’s ring made me pretty much unkillable unless I was ground into a paste. Repeatedly. I also had a pretty hefty amount of physical speed, mental speed, and strength, which were easily replenished the moment I got even a few flakes of metal to Compound. That left me vulnerable to mind control and not much else, and I might even be able to counter that with enough identity or determination, or copper if it worked like I thought it did.

No, I wasn’t worried about myself. Powerful Thinkers were rare, but there were rumors of them working for large villain organizations, and the Think Tank wasn’t even a secret; though by joining the Wards, I’d hopefully be safe from too much scrutiny by that Protectorate organization. If one of them picked up on my abilities to grant others powers, they wouldn’t come after me, which made a source of metals my number one priority until Dad had enough Compounded health and strength to get out of anything.

So when I woke up in the middle of the night with an arrow through my chest, I was mostly bemused—at least until the pain kicked in.

“Ow, fuck, ow, ow, fucking ow, why?” I said as I tapped gold. My knees itched.

I was fine as long as I didn’t run out of the metal, but it really, really, really hurt, and my regeneration wasn’t shoving the bolt out of my chest. It just … sat there. I tapped pewter and ripped it free with a grunt, looking around.

There was no one there, and no sign of forced entry. My window and door were intact, and there were no suspicious holes in the walls or ceiling.

I tapped zinc and steel. My thoughts raced ahead, my movements sluggish even while I was drawing on my embedded steel-minds. I had no clue who’d want to kill me. Well, there was the ABB, but if Oni Lee had escaped he wouldn’t go after me with an arrow, and Lung was a stompy rampaging monster when he fought. The only cape in the Bay who used arrows was Shadow Stalker, and I hadn’t seen her when I’d met the Wards so it looked like my worst fears were coming true, and some Thinker had revealed my Trump abilities. I raced over to Dad’s bedroom and sighed in relief when I saw him in bed, looking perfectly fine. I looked him over more thoroughly to make sure—checking his breathing didn’t really work when the movement of his chest was so slow to me that I wouldn’t be able to detect it.

There was no blood or sign of injury, so I raced out of the house, resuming the flow of time only for long enough to throw open the front door, then tapped steel until I was moving at speeds that weren’t going to do any favor to the surroundings.

My attacker had gone far. Really far. I wasted about a half-hour of subjective time thoroughly checking the area around me, then another ten minute lamenting my decision to put all the bronze I had under my skin. Whatever sensory ability it gave me would be really useful right about now.

In the end, it didn’t matter. I kept myself just below the speed that would create shockwaves in my wake. It was a lot easier to do now than at the Rig, with something about the feeling of the air against my skin allowing me to judge how quickly I could safely move. Zinc’s effect, most likely. Every so often, I paused—well, subjectively—and tapped zinc in an attempt to find any leads.

_ Area undisturbed. Faint impressions in spilled dumpster suggest most recent activity was a fight between homeless or druggies over contents. May be a drug stash. Pothole evidence of lack of maintenance. Mayor ignores actions that would ameliorate the city’s problems, comments from Dad suggest corruption. Bribed by gangs? Most likely gang would be Empire Eighty-Eight. _

I tore my attention away from wondering over the Bay’s rampant corruption, annoyed. I’d lost track of my goal, letting my enhanced mental capacity wander as it wanted to until it caught something of interest. I’d need to learn to cut myself off before zinc dragged me off into contemplating the nature of philosophy or something. I ran off to my next area of investigation.

_ Area undisturbed. Nearby van suggests area is under surveillance. Different make from PRT vans seen at PRT building. Older model, still serviceable, or not PRT at all? Could be— _

I cut myself off. That was interesting enough, but not what I needed right now. On to the next street.

_ Area undisturbed. Dropped needles are in amounts greater than normal for a single druggie. Likely Merchant territory for the moment. Marks on ground are from larger vehicles than normal, based on Merchant capes, likely tinkertech made by— _

_ Area undisturbed. Likely— _

_ Area undisturbed— _

_ Area undisturbed— _

_ Cape is either a Stranger or has some form of transport. _

Damn. I couldn’t really do anything about Stranger abilities unless I wanted the whole block to fall into a depression, and there were no active ground vehicles in the area. I frowned and looked up, scanning the skies, then sighed. Kid Win had a hoverboard, likely made at least in part of metals. I sped back home and poured the last vial of steel flakes down my throat, filling about half of them with speed beforehand since I was running low and storing that in my embedded steel-minds. The rest of the steel I burned Allomantically.

Back outside, I tensed, jumped, and Pushed against several pieces of metal at ground-level; the car, which I was sure could take my weight, a dropped penny, and several bits of metal coming from places I couldn’t discern fixed to places around the house. Then I stored iron. Dad had given me every type of metal, and my implanted iron-minds were perfect for what I was doing. My weight dropped away, leaving me frail but light as my Steelpush sent me rocketing into the sky. I adjusted my weight until I slowed with a view of the entire area, then stored as much as I could into my iron-minds and stopped tapping steel, letting gravity catch me just before I became weightless.

Then I tapped zinc again and everything was still, with me looking over it all while frozen in midair.

There. Thin blue lines lead off into the distance, a little ways away from the house. A hooded figure mid-stride on a rooftop, just before apparently jumping to the next one. Even though it was across the street.

Whoever it was definitely had some sort of movement power, along with apparently being able to shoot arrows through walls. There was only one cape I knew with powers who fit, but it couldn’t be her. I squinted but couldn’t get a good look at her. Then I blinked and remembered I had tin. I hadn’t thought to store anything in the many bits of tin I had under my skin since I figured I could store anything I needed easily enough. I tapped steel and dropped my connection to zinc, letting time pass for me and only for me as I stored my eyesight into a tin-mind. A few minutes (for me) later, I dropped steel for zinc again and tapped my tin-mind.

Dark cloak, crossbow, flat, emotionless mask—someone was trying to frame Shadow Stalker.


	15. 2.2—Synergizing

The outcome wasn’t in question. I had each of the sixteen basic metals embedded under my skin, steel flakes burning inside me, and a brass bracer on my arm.

Still, even with my overwhelming advantages, it didn’t make the process of subduing my assailant any easier. She’d replicated Shadow Stalker’s power, and any mundane method I had of trapping her immediately failed when she turned into smoke and drifted away. Seeing this gave me pause, a flicker of doubt entering my mind.

Sophia couldn’t be a Ward, there was no way the others wouldn’t see her abrasive attitude and lust for violence. Any system that had her working for it was one that needed to be brought down, hard. Madison could definitely fool the PRT, but she kept up her act even around me, acting as if every slight was an accident. She wouldn’t go for such a dark and broody costume. Emma, though … people often conflated good looks with trustworthiness, and Emma was a model. She also had the streak of viciousness that Shadow Stalker was rumored to show to any street thugs she pounced on.

I pushed my uncertainty aside. Sure, Emma could conceivably have gained powers and fooled the Wards into accepting her, but what were the odds that she’d still bother with me if she was an actual hero? An assassination attempt was even less likely, and Wards were supposed to go to Arcadia—I’d even been offered a transfer there myself, one I intended to take. And Tinkers could replicate powers easily; Leet did it all the time, though more competent capes made devices that didn’t randomly explode.

We danced through the air, the fake Shadow Stalker and I. She sprinted with an ease I would’ve envied if I didn’t have steel to make her athletic ability completely pointless in our race, pushing off against each rooftop and shifting to her gaseous state to sail through the air. I doggedly followed, nipping at her heels as I Pushed off the metal in the houses below and stored iron to keep myself weightless enough to make each jump.

Only part of my mind was on the chase itself. I could catch up to her easily. Killing her wouldn’t even take any effort, and at that thought, I once more checked to make sure I wasn’t tapping more than four times my normal strength through my pewter-mind. The problem was that I had no way to keep her from running away after I caught up to her. How was I supposed to capture someone who could go through walls and rooftops?

I sped up again, tapping zinc and steel. Somehow, she turned around and fired at me before I could bring myself up to my normal insane speed, the bolt shadowy and indistinct, cutting through the air without needing to deal with air resistance and lodging in my shoulder. I growled, tapped pewter, and tore it out, the wound sealing behind it.

_ Keep the arrow. May have identifying markings. _

Lacking proper pockets, or any real way to store an arrow, I simply jabbed it into my shirt. The tip entered near my collar and exited from the bottom of my shirt. It was ungainly and made my steps awkward, but it held. I pulled on steel until nothing moved and caught up to the imposter, studying her at every angle. I was careful not to touch her, but up close I noticed discrepancies with her normal costume. She cloak looked ragged, like it was homemade rather than PRT-approved costume material, and the mask was less detailed than the picture of it on her PHO page, the features merely suggestions of a nose or mouth rather than hyperrealistic representations. I found this version creepier.

_ No noticeable bumps in her costume or spaces that could hold tinkertech. Either miniaturized or inside of her body. _

Miniaturized tinkertech was rare. Brockton Bay had Armsmaster, so my perspective was skewed, but most Tinkers would need huge, lumpy backpacks to replicate Shadow Stalker’s power. Either some extremely powerful group was funding her, or she was the real Shadow Stalker. I wasn’t sure which of those possibilities I liked less.

Out of ideas, I tilted my head and forced zinc-boosted thoughts through my mind, looking for some solution. For a cape with this absolute level of defense, there was usually a weakness, unless the cape was Alexandria, but I couldn’t tell if her human form counted. Besides, they were always really esoteric and at least somewhat related to something in their personal life, and I wasn’t about to politely ask a fake Shadow Stalker to stay here while I went to the library and looked up common fears. The alternative to finding a seemingly-invincible cape’s weakness would classically be some form of mind control, and I … had that.

Zinc, and Brass. Allomantically, Zinc somehow Pulled emotions, while Brass Pushed. And I had an entire bracer made of brass on my arm.

I had to consider it. I didn’t want to become the kind of cape who mind-controlled people at a whim, but this was a pretty extreme circumstance. She’d tried to kill me in my civilian identity, and she was impersonating a cape. The only alternative to stopping her would be to kill her, and that was definitely worse. Besides, it was only emotional manipulation, not straight-up mind control. (Not yet, part of me whispered, but I ignored it.) And I was sure it didn’t last forever, not like Heartbreaker’s power did.

It was the best option. I slid my sleeve down under my brass bracer, separating the metal from my skin, and tapped the heat in my embedded brass-mind, bending off a piece and rolling it into a small bead of metal. I didn’t want to Compound heat, at least not now, so I tapped from the brass bead until it was empty and swallowed it.

Then I slowly let up on tapping my steel-mind, carefully watching the Shadow Stalker until I saw her react, flinching a hair backward, and slammed her with a Steelpush that flung her into the air. Her bow and the arrows in her quiver rocketed away, leaving her without her weapons.

Not that she was defenseless. She could give her arrows her same power, and if she could do that to her arrows I was certain she could send a rock in my lungs. Not that it would hurt me, but I was playing it safe after the last time I’d slipped out of accelerated speed in front of someone.

She turned into her shadow form, a human-shaped cloud of gas that drifted down from the sky. I hopped after her and waited until she was a safe distance above the ground before burning brass and hitting her with everything I had. The cloud swayed drunkenly in the air before it hit the ground. Then she was human again, and all at once she fell prone to the ground.

That was interesting. She had reacted to my Allomancy while in the air, but her Breaker state must have protected her from it somewhat judging from her reaction after she dropped it. I walked up to her and flipped her over. She was breathing, shallowly, so I hadn’t accidentally killed her. A knot inside me uncoiled at that—I hadn’t even realized how tense I’d been at the idea.

“Why did you attack me?” I said.

She didn’t respond. In and out, went her breaths. In and out. I let up a bit with my brass and waited for her to speak. She moved her hand. Sign language? I hadn’t considered that maybe she couldn’t actually talk. Looking back on it, I hadn’t heard her speak a single word. She reached down, fingers scrabbling over dirty asphalt until she grabbed hold of an empty soda can. She flickered, phased into her shadow state once more. I stood up, ready for another attack, but she just flicked the phased can up toward her head and lapsed back into her human form—

Alright, maybe I didn’t think through my impromptu interrogation session all the way. I quickly Pushed her out of the way with the few sources of metal still attached to her before the can could materialize inside her brain and doubled down with the brass inside me, sending her slumping back down to the street.

Emotion control. By smothering all her emotions, but letting up just enough that she could act, I’d made her suicidal. That was … ugh. I reached for my PRT phone before realizing I didn’t have it, but that didn’t really matter now that I thought about it. I could just tap enough pewter to carry this Shadow Stalker and cart her to the PRT building.

But first, I wanted to reassure myself. It was an imposter, so the normal rules for capes didn’t apply, right? I reached for the mask—

“Hey!”

I turned around and instantly tapped as much pewter as I could. The girl’s eyes widened, but I was focused on the monster she was riding. She grinned uneasily, and my gaze snapped up to her. She was dressed in a skintight catsuit and had the image of an eye on her chest. A cape.

She held up her hands. “Not here to fight … Jane? Oh, wow, Calamity Jane’s really your cape name? Why would—no, nevermind. It looked like you were just about to unmask a cape. We don’t do that here.”

I shook my head. “She’s not really a cape. Or if she is, she isn’t Shadow Stalker. She can’t be.”

“I see,” she said, chewing her lip. “Well, unless you’re completely sure, I recommend handing her over to the people who have experience dealing with that kind of thing. What if she’s a Stranger who’s transformed into Shadow Stalker? Off the top of my head, I know of three villains who replicate both the appearance and powers of anyone they touch.”

That … was a good point. I frowned. I couldn’t risk knowing the real Shadow Stalker’s identity; the PRT took that kind of thing very seriously. “Wait, who are you? Why do you care?”

“Oh, I’m Tattletale. Villain, but the good guys don’t try very hard when I show up. I’m too valuable, you see. I keep the game going, telling capes what they need to know to make sure everyone stays above the ground. That goes for heroes too,” she said with a wink.

Someone whistled, and I turned to look for the source. When I looked back, Tattletale and the lizard tiger monster thing she was riding on were gone.

My head whirling with questions, I carefully reduced the strength I was drawing on, picked up the fake Shadow Stalker, and set out for the PRT building.


End file.
